blob: a28d0424c4e9cc6f46a906ed0be41c5b6ac49a8c [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
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000015- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
16 deprecated, but the nuissance warning will not be issued.
17
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000018- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
19 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
20 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
21 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
22 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
23 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
24 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
25 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
26 destroyed.
27
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000028- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
29 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
30 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
31 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
32 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
33 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
34 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
35 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
36
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000037- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
38 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
39 character other than a space.
40
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000041- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
42 by the function object or by the method object, the function
43 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
44 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
45 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
46 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
47 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
48 attributes with the same name.
49
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000050- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
51 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
52 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
53 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
54 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
55 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
56 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
57 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
58 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
59 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
60 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
61 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
62 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
63 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000064
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000065- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
66 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
67 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
68 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
69 This has been repaired.
70
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000071- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
72
73- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
74
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000075- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
76 over a sequence.
77
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000078- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
79
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000080- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
81 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
82 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
83 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
84 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
85 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
86 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
87 records with equal keys is unchanged).
88
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000089- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
90 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000091
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000092- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
93 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
94 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
95
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000096- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
97 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
98 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
99 freelist.
100
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000101- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
102 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
103
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000104- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
105 number.
106
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000107- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
108 a TypeError exception.
109
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000110- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
111 820195.
112
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000113- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
114 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
115 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
116
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000117Extension modules
118-----------------
119
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000120- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
121 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
122 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
123 other functions that expect a function argument.
124
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000125- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
126
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000127- os.getsid was added.
128
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000129- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
130 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
131 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
132
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000133- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
134
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000135- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
136
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000137- readline.clear_history was added.
138
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000139- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
140
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000141- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
142
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000143- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
144
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000145- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
146
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000147- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
148
149- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
150
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000151- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
152
153- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
154
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000155- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
156 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
157 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
158
159- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
160 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
161 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
162 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
163 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
164 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
165 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
166
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000167- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
168 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
169 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
170 the Unix uniq filter.
171
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000172- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
173 iterators from a single iterable.
174
175- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
176 of raising a TypeError exception.
177
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000178Library
179-------
180
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000181- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
182 they are passed to the compiler.
183
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000184- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
185 indent, width and depth.
186
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000187- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
188 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
189
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000190- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
191 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
192
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000193- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
194
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000195- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
196
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000197- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
198
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000199- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
200 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
201
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000202- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
203
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000204- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
205 a string).
206
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000207- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
208
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000209- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
210
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000211- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
212
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000213- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
214
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000215- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
216 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
217 list of fieldnames.
218
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000219- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
220 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
221
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000222- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
223
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000224- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
225 empty lists.
226
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000227- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
228 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
229 and shelves.
230
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000231- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
232 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
233
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000234- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000235 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
236 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000237
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000238- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
239 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000240 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000241
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000242- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000243 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
244 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
245
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000246- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
247 and removed in Py2.4.
248
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000249- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
250
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000251Tools/Demos
252-----------
253
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000254- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
255
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000256- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
257 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
258 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
259 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
260
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000261- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
262
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000263- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
264 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
265 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
266 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
267 now.
268
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000269- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
270 in effect
271
272- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
273 C-c C-h
274
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000275- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
276 -d option was given.
277
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000278Build
279-----
280
281C API
282-----
283
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000284- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
285 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
286 about 10% faster.
287
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000288- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
289 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
290
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000291- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
292 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
293 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
294 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
295
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000296New platforms
297-------------
298
299Tests
300-----
301
302Windows
303-------
304
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000305- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
306 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
307 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
308 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
309
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000310- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
311 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
312 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
313
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000314Mac
315----
316
317
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000318What's New in Python 2.3 final?
319===============================
320
321*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
322
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000323IDLE
324----
325
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000326- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
327 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
328 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
329 context-menu actions.
330
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000331- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
332 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
333 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
334 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
335 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
336 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
337 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
338 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
339 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
340
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000341
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000342What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
343=============================================
344
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000345*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000346
347Core and builtins
348-----------------
349
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000350- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000351 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000352 comment at the end are still unsupported.
353
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000354Extension modules
355-----------------
356
357- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
358 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
359 than once. This has been fixed.
360
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000361- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
362 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
363 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
364 call.
365
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000366- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
367
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000368Library
369-------
370
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000371- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
372 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
373
374- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
375 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
376 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
377 restored.
378
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000379IDLE
380----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000381
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000382- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000383
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000384Build
385-----
386
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000387- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
388 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
389
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000390C API
391-----
392
393Windows
394-------
395
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000396- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
397 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
398
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000399- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
400
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000401Mac
402---
403
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000404- Various fixes to pimp.
405
406- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
407
408- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
409 more problems than it solves.
410
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000411
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000412What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
413=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000414
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000415*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
416
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000417Core and builtins
418-----------------
419
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000420- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
421 by sys.setcheckinterval().
422
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000423- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
424 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000425 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000426
427- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
428 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
429 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000430 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000431
432- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
433 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000434
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000435- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
436 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
437 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
438
439- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000440 770247.
441
442- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000443
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000444Extension modules
445-----------------
446
447- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
448 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
449
450- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
451
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000452- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
453
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000454- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
455 contained within the _strptime module.
456
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000457- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
458 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
459
460- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000461 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
462
463- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
464 the find_class attribute, if present.
465
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000466- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000467
468 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
469 (SF bug 763298).
470
471 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000472 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
473 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
474 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000475
476 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
477
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000478Library
479-------
480
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000481- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
482
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000483- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
484 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
485 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
486 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
487 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
488 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
489 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
490 or Tester().
491
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000492- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
493 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
494 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
495 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
496 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
497 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
498 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
499 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
500 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000501
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000502 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000503
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000504- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
505 weren't before was an oversight.
506
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000507- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
508 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
509
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000510- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
511 when there are no lines.
512
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000513- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
514 which could occur with Tk 8.4
515
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000516- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
517 to child processes.
518
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000519- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
520
521- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
522
523- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
524 xmlrpclib.
525
526- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
527 responses.
528
529- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
530 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
531
532- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
533 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
534 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
535
536- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
537 used as patterns.
538
539- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
540 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
541 than Tk 8.3.
542
543- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
544
545- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000546
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000547Tools/Demos
548-----------
549
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000550- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
551
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000552- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
553
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000554- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000555
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000556Build
557-----
558
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000559- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
560
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000561- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
562
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000563- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
564 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000565
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000566- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
567 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
568 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000569
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000570C API
571-----
572
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000573- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
574 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
575
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000576Windows
577-------
578
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000579- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
580 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
581 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
582 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
583 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
584 Python exception ::
585
586 thread.error: can't start new thread
587
588 is raised now.
589
590- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
591 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
592 instead of from DLL teardown.
593
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000594Mac
595---
596
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000597- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000598 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000599 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
600 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
601 the executable in the bundle.
602
603- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000604
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000605- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
606
607- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
608 on Panther.
609
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000610What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
611================================
612
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000613*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000614
615Core and builtins
616-----------------
617
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000618- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
619 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
620 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
621 with the -i option.
622
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000623- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
624 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
625
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000626- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
627 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
628
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000629- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
630 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
631 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
632 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
633 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
634 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
635 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
636 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
637 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
638 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
639 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
640 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
641 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000642
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000643- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
644 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
645 embedded in a lambda expression.
646
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000647- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
648 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
649 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
650 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
651 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
652
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000653- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
654 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
655 matches the restriction on classic classes.
656
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000657- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
658 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
659
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000660- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
661 It's writable again.
662
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000663- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
664 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
665 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000666 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000667
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000668- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
669 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
670 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
671
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000672Extension modules
673-----------------
674
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000675- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
676 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
677
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000678- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
679 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
680 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
681 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
682
683- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
684 collection.
685
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000686- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
687 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
688 unique within a single program run.
689
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000690- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
691 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
692
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000693- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
694 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
695
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000696- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
697 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000698
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000699- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
700
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000701- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
702 Fixes SF bug #730685.
703
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000704- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
705 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
706 for many BSD-derived systems.
707
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000708
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000709Library
710-------
711
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000712- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
713 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
714 primary ones:
715
716 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
717 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
718 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
719
720 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
721 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
722 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
723 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
724 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
725 framework features (which doctest lacks).
726
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000727- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
728 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
729 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
730 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
731 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
732 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
733 argument.
734
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000735- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
736 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
737 in the archive.
738
739- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
740 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
741
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000742- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
743 569574).
744
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000745- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
746 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
747 no more.
748
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000749- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
750 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
751 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
752 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
753 code coverage.
754
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000755- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
756 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
757 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000758 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
759 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000760
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000761- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
762 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
763 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000764 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000765
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000766- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
767
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000768- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
769 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
770 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
771 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
772
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000773- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
774 handling.
775
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000776- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
777 __doc__ of data descriptors.
778
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000779- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
780 in socket.py.
781
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000782- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
783
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000784- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
785 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
786 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
787 opener with proxy support.
788
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000789- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
790
791- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
792
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000793Tools/Demos
794-----------
795
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000796- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
797
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000798- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
799
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000800- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
801 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000802
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000803- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
804 files.
805
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000806Build
807-----
808
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000809- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000810 different root directory.
811
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000812C API
813-----
814
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000815- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
816 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
817 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
818 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
819 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
820 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
821 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
822 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
823 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
824 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
825
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000826- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
827 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
828 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
829 from Python.
830
831
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000832New platforms
833-------------
834
835None this time.
836
837Tests
838-----
839
840- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
841 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
842
843Windows
844-------
845
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000846- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
847
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000848- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
849 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
850 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
851 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
852 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
853 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
854 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
855 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
856 that's what it's for.
857
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000858Mac
859---
860
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000861- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
862 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
863 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
864 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000865- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
866 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
867- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000868
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000869SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
870------------------------------------
871
872430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
873598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
874622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
875661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
876683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
877697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
878713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
879724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
880727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
881729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
882730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
883731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
884732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
885733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
886735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
887740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
888744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
889745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
890747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
891749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
892751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
893753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
894755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
895757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
896760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
897
898
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000899What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
900================================
901
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000902*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000903
904Core and builtins
905-----------------
906
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000907- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
908 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
909
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000910- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
911 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
912 and cannot be strings).
913
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000914- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
915 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
916 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
917 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
918
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000919- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
920 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
921 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
922 Python itself.
923
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000924- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
925 the referenced object, if it has one.
926
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000927- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
928 the thread started at
929 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
930
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000931- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
932 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
933 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
934 placed on a list index.
935
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000936- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
937 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
938 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
939 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
940
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000941- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
942 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
943 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
944 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
945 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
946 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
947 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
948
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000949- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
950 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
951 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
952 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
953 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
954
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000955- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
956 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000957
958- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
959 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
960 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
961 #693195.)
962
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000963- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
964 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000965
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000966- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000967 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000968 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
969 interpreter executions, would fail.
970
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000971- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000972 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000973 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000974
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000975Extension modules
976-----------------
977
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000978- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
979 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
980 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
981 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
982
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000983- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
984 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
985
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000986- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
987 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
988 and Greg Chapman.)
989
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000990- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
991 recursively.
992
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000993- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000994 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
995 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
996 leaks.
997
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000998- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
999
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001000- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1001 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1002 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1003 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1004 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1005 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1006 #705836.
1007
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001008- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001009 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1010
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001011- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1012 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1013 See SF bug #692416.
1014
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001015- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1016 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1017
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001018- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1019 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1020 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001021
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001022- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001023 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1024 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1025
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001026- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1027 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1028 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1029 timeouts to work properly.
1030
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001031Library
1032-------
1033
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001034- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1035 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1036 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1037 future release.
1038
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001039- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1040 for querying platform dependent features.
1041
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001042- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001043
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001044- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1045 pickle protocol versions.
1046
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001047- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1048 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1049 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1050
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001051- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1052
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001053- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1054 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1055 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1056 modules.
1057
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001058- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1059 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1060 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1061
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001062- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1063 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1064
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001065- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1066 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1067 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1068
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001069- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001070 MS Office extensions.
1071
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001072- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1073 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1074
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001075- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1076 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1077
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001078- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1079 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1080 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1081 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1082 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1083 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1084
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001085- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1086 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1087 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001088
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001089- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1090 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1091 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1092
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001093- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1094
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001095- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1096 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1097 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1098
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001099Tools/Demos
1100-----------
1101
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001102- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1103 See the module docstring for details.
1104
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001105Build
1106-----
1107
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001108- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1109 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001110
1111C API
1112-----
1113
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001114- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1115
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001116- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1117 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1118 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1119
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001120- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1121 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001122
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001123 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1124 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1125 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001126
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001127- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001128 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1129
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001130- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1131 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1132 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001133
1134New platforms
1135-------------
1136
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001137None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001138
1139Tests
1140-----
1141
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001142- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1143 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001144
1145Windows
1146-------
1147
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001148- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1149 function.
1150
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001151- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1152 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001153
1154Mac
1155---
1156
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001157- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1158 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001159
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001160- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1161 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001162
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001163- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1164 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1165 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001166
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001167- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001168 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1169 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001170
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001171- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1172 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001173
1174
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001175What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1176=================================
1177
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001178*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001179
1180Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001181-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001182
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001183- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1184 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1185 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1186
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001187- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1188 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1189 (SF patch #664376.)
1190
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001191- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1192 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1193 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1194 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1195 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1196 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001197 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001198
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001199- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1200 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1201 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1202 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001203 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001204
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001205- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1206 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1207 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1208 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1209 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1210 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1211 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1212 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1213 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1214 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1215 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1216
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001217- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1218 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1219 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1220 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1221 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1222 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1223
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001224- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1225 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1226
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001227- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1228 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1229 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1230 case.)
1231
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001232- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1233 passed as unicode strings.
1234
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001235- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1236 See SF bug #683467.
1237
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001238- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1239 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1240
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001241- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1242
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001243- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1244
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001245- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1246 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1247 arguments.
1248
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001249- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1250 See SF bug #667147.
1251
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001252- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001253 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001254 See SF bug #676155.
1255
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001256- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001257 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001258 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1259 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1260 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1261 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1262 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1263 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001264
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001265Extension modules
1266-----------------
1267
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001268- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1269 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1270 tp_as_number pointer.
1271
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001272- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1273 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1274 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1275 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1276 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1277
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001278- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1279
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001280- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1281
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001282- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001283 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001284 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1285 patch #678531.)
1286
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001287- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1288 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1289
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001290- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1291 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1292
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001293- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1294
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001295- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1296 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1297 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1298
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001299- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1300
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001301- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1302 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1303
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001304- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001305
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001306- datetime changes:
1307
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001308 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1309
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001310 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1311 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1312 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1313 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1314 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1315 now.
1316
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001317 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001318 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1319 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001320
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001321 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001322 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001323 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1324 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1325 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1326 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001327
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001328 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1329 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1330 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001331 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1332
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001333 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1334 by a later example coded by Guido.
1335
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001336 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001337 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1338 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1339 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001340 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1341 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1342
1343 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1344 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1345 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1346 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1347 tzinfo subclass instance.
1348
1349 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1350 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1351 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1352 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1353 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1354 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1355 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1356 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001357
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001358 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1359 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1360 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1361 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1362 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001363 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1364
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001365 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001366
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001367 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1368 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1369 as a naive datetime object.
1370
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001371 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1372 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1373 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1374
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001375 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1376 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1377 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1378 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1379 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1380 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1381 comparison.
1382
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001383 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1384 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1385 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1386 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001387 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001388
1389 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001390
1391 and ::
1392
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001393 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1394
1395 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1396 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1397 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1398 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1399
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001400 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1401 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1402 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1403 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1404 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1405
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001406 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1407 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001408 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1409 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001410
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001411Library
1412-------
1413
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001414- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1415 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1416
1417- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1418 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1419 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1420 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1421 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1422 See PEP 307 for details.
1423
1424- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1425 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1426
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001427- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1428 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001429 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001430 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1431 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001432 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001433
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001434- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1435 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1436
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001437- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1438 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1439 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1440
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001441- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1442
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001443- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1444 exception.
1445
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001446- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1447 class.
1448
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001449- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1450 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1451 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1452
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001453- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1454 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1455
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001456- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001457 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1458 See SF bug #659228.
1459
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001460- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1461 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1462 See SF patch #651082.
1463
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001464- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001465
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001466- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1467 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1468
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001469- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001470 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001471
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001472- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1473 DOS paths from other platforms.
1474
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001475Tools/Demos
1476-----------
1477
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001478- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1479 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1480 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1481 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1482 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1483 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1484 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1485 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1486 example:
1487
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001488 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1489 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001490
1491 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1492
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001493
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001494Build
1495-----
1496
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001497- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1498 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1499 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001500 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1501
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001502 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1503
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001504- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1505 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1506 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1507 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1508 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1509 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1510 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1511 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1512 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1513
1514- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1515 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1516 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1517 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1518
1519- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1520 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1521
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001522C API
1523-----
1524
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001525- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1526 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001527
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001528- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1529 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1530 tp_as_number pointer.
1531
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001532- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1533 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1534 (SF #681367)
1535
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001536- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1537 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1538 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1539 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001541Tests
1542-----
1543
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001544- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001545 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1546 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1547 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1548 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1549 pydoc.)
1550
1551- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1552
1553- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001554
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001555Windows
1556-------
1557
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001558- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1559 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1560 time).
1561
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001562- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1563 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1564
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001565- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1566 release without strong cryptography.
1567
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001568- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001569 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001570
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001571- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1572 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1573
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001574Mac
1575---
1576
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001577- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1578 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001579
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001580- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1581 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1582 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001583
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001584- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1585 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001586
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001587- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1588 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1589 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1590 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001591
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001592- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001593 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1594 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1595 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001596
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001597
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001598What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001599=================================
1600
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001601*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001602
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001603Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001604--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001605
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001606- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1607
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001608- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1609 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001610 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001611 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001612 a different meaning than before.
1613
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001614- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001615 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001616 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001617
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001618- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001619 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001620 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001621
1622- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1623 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1624 and deallocation.
1625
1626- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1627 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1628
1629- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1630 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1631 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1632 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1633 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1634
1635- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1636 now detected by the garbage collector.
1637
1638- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1639 [SF bug 519621]
1640
1641- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1642 identifier.
1643
1644- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1645 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1646 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1647 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1648 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1649 [SF bug 563060]
1650
1651- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1652 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1653 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1654 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1655 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1656
1657- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1658 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1659 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1660
1661- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1662
1663- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1664 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1665 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1666 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1667 state of the slots would be lost.)
1668
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001669Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001670-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001671
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001672- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001673 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1674 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1675 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1676 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001677 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1678 Jython 2.1.
1679
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001680- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001681 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001682 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1683 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1684 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1685 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1686 these, see PEP 302.
1687
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001688- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1689 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1690 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1691
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001692- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1693 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1694 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1695
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001696- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1697 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1698 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1699
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001700- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1701 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1702 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1703 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1704 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1705 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1706 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1707 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1708 releases or implementations.
1709
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001710- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001711 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1712 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001713
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001714- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1715 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1716
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001717- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1718 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1719 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1720
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001721- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1722 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1723
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001724- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1725 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001726 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1727 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001728
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001729- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1730 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1731 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1732 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1733 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1734
1735 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1736 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1737 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1738 pattern.
1739
1740 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1741 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1742 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1743 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1744
1745 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1746 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1747 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1748 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1749 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1750 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1751
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001752- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1753 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1754 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1755 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1756 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1757 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1758 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1759 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001760
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001761- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1762 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1763 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1764 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1765 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001766 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1767 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1768 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1769 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1770 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1771 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1772 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001773
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001774- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1775 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1776
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001777- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1778 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1779 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1780 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1781 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1782 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1783 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1784 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1785 to Zack Weinberg!
1786
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001787- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1788 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1789 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1790 type. This has been fixed now.
1791
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001792- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1793 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1794 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1795
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001796- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1797 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1798 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1799 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1800 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1801 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1802 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1803 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001804 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001805
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001806- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1807 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1808 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001809
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001810- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1811 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1812 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1813 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1814 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1815 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1816 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1817 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001818 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001819 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1820 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1821
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001822- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1823 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1824 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1825 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1826 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1827 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1828 this.)
1829
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001830- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1831 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001832 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001833 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001834 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1835 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001836 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1837 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001838
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001839- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1840 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1841 currently running.
1842
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001843- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1844 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1845 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1846 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1847
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001848- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1849 as directory names.
1850
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001851- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1852 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1853
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001854- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1855 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1856
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001857- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001858 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1859 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001860
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001861- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1862 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1863 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1864 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1865 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1866
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001867- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1868 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1869 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1870 removed.
1871
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001872- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1873 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1874 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1875
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001876- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1877 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1878 to __debug__.
1879
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001880- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1881 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1882 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1883
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001884- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1885 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1886 deprecated now.
1887
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001888- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1889 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1890 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001891
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001892- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1893 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1894 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1895 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1896 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001897
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001898- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1899 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1900
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001901- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1902 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1903 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001904 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001905 is backward compatible.
1906
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001907- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1908 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1909 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1910 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1911 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1912
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001913- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1914 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1915 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1916 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1917 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1918 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001919
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001920- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1921 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1922
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001923- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1924 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1925
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001926- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1927 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1928 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1929 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1930 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1931
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001932- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1933 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1934 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1935
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001936- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001937 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1938
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001939- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1940 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1941 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001942
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001943- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1944 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1945
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001946- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1947 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1948 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1949
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001950- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1951
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001952Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001953-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001954
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001955- Added three operators to the operator module:
1956 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1957 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1958 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1959
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001960- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1961
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001962- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1963 archives.
1964
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001965- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1966 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1967 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1968
1969 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1970
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001971- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1972 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1973 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001974 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001975
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001976- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1977 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1978 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1979 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001980 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1981 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1982 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1983 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001984
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001985- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1986 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001987
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001988- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1989
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001990- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1991 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1992
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001993- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1994 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1995 supported.
1996
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001997- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1998
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001999- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2000 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002001
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002002- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2003 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2004
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002005- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2006
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002007- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2008 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2009
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002010- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2011 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2012 functions but callable type objects.
2013
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002014- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002015 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002016 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002017
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002018- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2019 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002020
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002021- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2022 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002023
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002024- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2025 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2026 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2027 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2028
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002029- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2030 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002031
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002032- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2033 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2034 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2035 and __imul__.
2036
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002037- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002038 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2039 is called.
2040
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002041- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2042 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2043 interpreter was compiled.
2044
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002045- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2046 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2047 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002048 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002049 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2050 1, not 2.
2051
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002052- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2053 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2054 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2055 limit.
2056
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002057- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2058 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2059 bug #623464.
2060
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002061- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2062 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2063 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2064 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2065
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002066Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002067-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002068
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002069- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2070
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002071- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2072 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2073 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2074 with Python 2.3a2.
2075
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002076- os.path exposes getctime.
2077
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002078- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002079 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002080 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002081 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002082 unit tests of floating point results.
2083
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002084- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2085 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2086 has been increased.
2087
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002088- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2089 executed.
2090
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002091- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2092 postinstallation script.
2093
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002094- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2095 test the current module.
2096
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002097- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002098 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2099 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2100 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2101 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2102
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002103- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002104 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002105 Ward's Optik package.
2106
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002107- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2108 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2109 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2110 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2111
2112- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2113 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002114 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002115
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002116- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2117 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2118 shelf are binary pickles.
2119
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002120- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2121 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2122
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002123- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2124 modules are iterators now.
2125
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002126- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2127 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2128 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2129 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2130 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2131 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002132
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002133- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2134 with their entity value.
2135
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002136- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2137
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002138- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2139 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002140
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002141- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2142 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002143 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002144
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002145- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2146 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2147 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2148 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2149 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2150 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2151 main():
2152
2153 import locale
2154 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2155
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002156- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2157 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2158
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002159- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2160 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2161 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2162 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2163 to the new standard.
2164
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002165- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2166 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2167 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2168 an extension to the database.
2169
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002170- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2171 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2172 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2173 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002174 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002175
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002176- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002177 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002178
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002179- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2180 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2181 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2182 bounded integers.
2183
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002184- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2185 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2186 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2187 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2188 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2189 in existence.
2190
2191 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2192 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2193 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2194 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2195 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2196 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2197
2198 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2199 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2200 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2201 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2202
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002203- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2204 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2205 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2206
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002207- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2208
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002209- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2210 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2211 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2212 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2213
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002214- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2215 argument.
2216
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002217- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2218 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2219 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2220 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2221 [SF patch 560794].
2222
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002223- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2224 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2225 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002226 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2227 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2228 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002229
2230- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2231 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002232
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002233- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2234 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2235 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2236 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002237
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002238- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2239 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2240 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2241 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2242 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2243
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002244- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002245
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002246- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2247
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002248- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2249 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2250 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2251 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2252 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2253 identical to None.
2254
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002255- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2256 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2257 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2258 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2259 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2260 results now.
2261
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002262- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2263 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2264
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002265- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2266 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2267 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2268 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2269 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2270 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2271 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2272 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2273
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002274- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2275
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002276- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2277 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2278
2279- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2280 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2281 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2282 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2283 and other systems.
2284
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002285- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2286 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2287 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2288 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 +00002289 work well with these.
2290
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002291- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2292
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002293- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002294 connections.
2295
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002296- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2297 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2298 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2299
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002300- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2301 sets
2302
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002303- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2304 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2305 name.
2306
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002307- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2308 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2309 passed in.
2310
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002311- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002312 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002313 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2314 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002315
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002316- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2317
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002318- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2319
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002320- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2321 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2322 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2323
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002324- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2325 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2326 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2327 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002328 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002329
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002330- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002331 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002332 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002333
2334- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2335 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2336 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2337
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002338- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002339 the value of its expression argument.
2340
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002341- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2342 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2343 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2344
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002345- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2346 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2347 skipstone browser was included.
2348
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002349- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2350 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2351
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002352Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002353-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002354
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002355- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2356 names in addition to accepting file names.
2357
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002358- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2359 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2360 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2361 still used and useful.)
2362
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002363- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2364 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2365 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2366 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002367
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002368- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2369 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2370 the generated binary.
2371
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002372Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002373-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002374
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002375- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2376
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002377- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2378 except in the hands of experts.
2379
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002380- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002381 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2382 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2383 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002384
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002385- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2386 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2387 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2388 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2389 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2390 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2391 builds.
2392
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002393- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2394 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2395 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2396 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2397 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2398 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2399 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2400 new type.
2401
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002402- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002403
2404 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2405 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2406 positive infinities.
2407
2408 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2409 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2410 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2411 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2412 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2413 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2414 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2415
2416 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2417
2418 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2419
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002420- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2421 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2422 size of the executable.
2423
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002424- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2425 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2426 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2427 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002428
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002429- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2430
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002431- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2432 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2433 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002434
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002435- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2436 well as Unix.
2437
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002438- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2439 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2440 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2441 modules in the README file for details.
2442
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002443C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002444-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002445
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002446- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2447 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002448 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002449 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002450 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002451
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002452- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2453 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2454 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2455 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2456 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2457 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002458 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002459 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2460 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2461 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2462 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2463 aligned.)
2464
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002465- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2466 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2467 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2468
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002469- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2470 level.
2471
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002472- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2473 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2474 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2475 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2476 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2477
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002478- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2479 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2480 code.
2481
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002482- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2483 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2484 adjusting for negative indices.
2485
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002486- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2487 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2488 object.
2489
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002490- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2491 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2492 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2493
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002494- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2495 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002496
2497- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2498
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002499- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2500 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2501 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2502 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2503
2504- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2505
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002506- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002507
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002508- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002509 without going through the buffer API.
2510
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002511- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002512
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002513- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2514 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2515 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2516 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2517
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002518- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2519 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2520
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002521- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002522 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2523
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002524New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002525-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002526
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002527- OpenVMS is now supported.
2528
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002529- AtheOS is now supported.
2530
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002531- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2532
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002533- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2534
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002535Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002536-----
2537
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002538- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2539 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2540 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002541
2542Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002543-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002544
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002545- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2546 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2547 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2548 bugs.
2549 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002550 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002551 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2552 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002553 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002554
2555- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002556 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002557
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002558- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2559 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2560
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002561- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2562 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002563 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002564 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2565
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002566- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2567 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2568 use files" uninstall option).
2569
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002570- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2571
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002572- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2573 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2574
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002575- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2576 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2577 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2578
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002579- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2580 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2581 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2582 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2583 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002584 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2585 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2586 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002587
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002588- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002589 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002590 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2591 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2592 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2593 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2594 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2595 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2596 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2597 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2598 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2599 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2600 work around.
2601
2602- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2603 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2604 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2605 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2606 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2607 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2608 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2609 specified with O_CREAT too).
2610
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002611Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002612----
2613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002614- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002615
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002616- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2617 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2618 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2619
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002620- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2621 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2622 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2623
2624- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2625 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2626 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2627 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2628 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2629 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2630 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2631 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002632
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002633- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2634 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2635 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002636
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002637- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2638 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2639 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2640 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2641 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002642
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002643- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2644 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2645 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002646
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002647- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2648 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002649
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002650- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2651 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2652 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2653 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2654 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002655
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002656- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2657 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2658 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2659
2660- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2661 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2662 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002663
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002664- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2665 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2666 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2667 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002668 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002669
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002670- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2671 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002672
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002673- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2674 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002675
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002676- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002677 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002678 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2679 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002680
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002681
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002682What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002683===============================
2684
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002685*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2686
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002687Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002688--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002689
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002690- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2691 with a custom metaclass.
2692
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002693Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002694-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002695
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002696- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2697 are proxies.
2698
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002699Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002700-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002701
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002702- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2703 very short strings.
2704
2705- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2706 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2707 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2708 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2709 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2710
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002711Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002712-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002713
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002714- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2715 close or delete time).
2716
2717- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2718 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2719
2720- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2721
2722- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002723 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002724
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002725Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002726-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002727
2728Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002729-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002730
2731C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002732-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002733
2734New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002735-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002736
2737Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002738-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002739
2740Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002742
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002743- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2744
2745- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2746 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2747
2748- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2749 deleted at process exit time.
2750
2751- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2752 in backslash.
2753
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002754Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002755----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002756
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002757- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2758 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2759 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2760
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002761
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002762What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002763===========================
2764
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002765*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2766
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002767Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002769
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002770- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2771 been extensively updated. See
2772
2773 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2774
2775 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2776
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002777- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2778 deleted!
2779
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002780- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2781 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2782 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2783 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2784 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2785
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002786- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2787
2788 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2789 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2790
2791 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2792 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2793 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2794 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2795 supported anyway.
2796
2797 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2798 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2799
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002800- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2801 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2802 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2803 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2804 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002805
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002806- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2807 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2808 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2809
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002810Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002812
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002813- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2814 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2815 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2816 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2817 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2818 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002819 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2820 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2821 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2822 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002823
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002824- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2825 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2826 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2827
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002828Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002830
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002831- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2832
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002833Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002834-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002835
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002836- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2837 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2838 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2839 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2840 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2841 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2842
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002843- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2844
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002845- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2846
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002847- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2848
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002849- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2850 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2851 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2852
2853- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2854
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002855Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002857
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002858- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2859 off a search on Google.
2860
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002861Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002862-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002863
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002864- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2865 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2866 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2867 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2868 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2869 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2870 other platforms should do likewise.
2871
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002872- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2873 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2874 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2875
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002876C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002877-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002878
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002879- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2880 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2881 producing key-value pairs.
2882
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002883- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002884 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002885 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2886 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2887 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2888 previously went unchallenged.
2889
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002890New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002891-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002892
2893Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002894-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002895
2896Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002897-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002898
2899Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002901
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002902- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2903 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002904
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002905- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2906 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2907 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2908 home.
2909
2910
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002911What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002912===========================
2913
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002914*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2915
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002916Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002917--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002918
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002919- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2920 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002921
2922 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002923 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002924
2925 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2926 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002927 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002928 This needs to be documented.
2929
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002930- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2931 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2932
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002933- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2934 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2935 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2936
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002937- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2938 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2939
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002940- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2941 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2942 class forbids it).
2943
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002944- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2945 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2946 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2947
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002948- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2949
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002950Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002952
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002953- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2954 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002955 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002956
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002957- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2958 (like 1 + '').
2959
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002960Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002961-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002962
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002963- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2964 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2965 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2966 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002967 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002968 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2969
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002970- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2971 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2972 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2973 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2974
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002975- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2976 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002977 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2978 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2979 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002980
2981- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2982 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002983
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002984- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2985 bytes on its input.
2986
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002987Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002989
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002990- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002991 convenience function.
2992
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002993- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2994 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2995 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002996 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2997 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2998 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2999 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3000 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3001 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003002
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003003- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3004 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3005 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3006 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3007
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003008- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3009 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3010 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3011
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003012- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3013 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3014 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3015 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3016
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003017- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3018 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003020 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3021 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3022 new -l and -e options.
3023
3024- statcache is now deprecated.
3025
3026- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3027 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003029 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3030 time properly taken into account.
3031
3032- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3033 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3034 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3035 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3036
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003037Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003038-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003039
3040Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003042
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003043- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3044 is built with libdb3 if available.
3045
3046- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3047
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003048C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003049-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003050
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003051- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3052 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3053 PySequence_Size().
3054
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003055- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3056
3057- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3058 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3059 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3060
3061- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3062 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3063
3064- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3065 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3066
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003067New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003069
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003070- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3071 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3072
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003073- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3074 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3075
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003076- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3077
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003078Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003079-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003080
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003081- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3082 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3083
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003084Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003085-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003086
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003087Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003088----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003089
3090- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3091 removed completely in the next release.
3092
3093- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3094 OSX.
3095
3096- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3097 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3098
3099- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3100
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003101
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003102What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003103===========================
3104
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3106
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003107Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003108--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003109
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003110- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003111 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003112 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003113 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3114 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003115 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3116 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003117 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3118 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003119
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003120- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3121 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3122
3123- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3124 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3125
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003126Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003127-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003128
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003129- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3130 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3131 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3132 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3133 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3134 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3135 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3136 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3137
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003138- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3139 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3140 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3141 example).
3142
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003143- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003144 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003145 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003146 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003147
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003148- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3149 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3150 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003151 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003152
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003153- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3154 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3155 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3156 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3157 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3158 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3159
3160 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3161
3162 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3163
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003164Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003166
3167- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3168
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003169- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3170
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003171- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3172 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003173
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003174- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3175 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3176 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3177 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3178 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3179 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003180 attributes.
3181
3182- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3183 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3184 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003185
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003186- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3187 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3188 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003189
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003190- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3191 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3192 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003193 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3194 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3195
3196- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3197 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003198
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003199Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003201
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003202- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3203 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3204
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003205- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3206 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3207 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3208 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3209
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003210- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3211 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3212 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3213 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3214
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003215 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3216 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3217 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3218 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3219 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3220 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3221 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3222 without losing information).
3223
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003224- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003225 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3226 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3227 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3228 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3229 module).
3230
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003231 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003232 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3233 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3234 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3235 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003236
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003237- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003238 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3239 encoding.
3240
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003241- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3242 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3243
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003244- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003245 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3246
3247- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3248 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3249 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3250 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3251
3252- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3253
3254- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3255 ON, and OFF.
3256
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003257- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3258 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3259
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003260Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003262
3263- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3264 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3265 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003266
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003267- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3268 been added: -X and -E.
3269
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003270Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003272
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003273- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3274 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3275
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003276C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003277-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003278
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003279- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3280 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3281 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3282 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3283 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3284
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003285- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3286 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3287 as long) arguments.
3288
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003289- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3290 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3291 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3292 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3293 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3294 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3295
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003296- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3297 input.
3298
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003299New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003300-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003301
3302Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003304
3305Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003307
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003308- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3309 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3310 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3311
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003312- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3313 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3314 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003315 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003316
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3318 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3319 import signal
3320 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003321
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003323 while 1:
3324 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003326 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3327 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3328 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3329 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003330
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003331
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003332What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3333===========================
3334
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003335*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3336
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003337Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003338--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003339
3340- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3341 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3342 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3343
3344- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3345 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3346 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3347 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3348 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3349 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3350 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003351
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003352- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003353 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003354 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3355 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3356 associate a docstring with a property.
3357
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003358- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3359 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3360 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3361 other built-in object types.
3362
3363- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3364 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3365 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3366 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3367 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3368
3369- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3370 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3371
3372- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3373 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003374 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003375 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3376 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3377 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3378 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3379 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3380
3381- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3382 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3383 class.
3384
3385- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3386 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3387 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3388 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3389
3390- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3391 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3392 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3393 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3394
3395- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3396 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3397
3398- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3399 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3400 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3401 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3402 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003403 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003404 with the same value as s.
3405
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003406- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3407
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003408Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003409----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003410
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003411- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3412
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003413- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3414 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3415 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3416 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3417 objects.
3418
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003419- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3420 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003421 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3422 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3423
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003424- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3425 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3426 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3427
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003428Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003430
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003431- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3432 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3433 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3434 by the instances.
3435
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003436- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3437 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3438 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3439
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003440- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3441 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3442 before the entire comparison is complete.
3443
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003444- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3445 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3446 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3447
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003448- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3449 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3450 getwriter().
3451
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003452- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3453 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3454
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003455- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003456 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3457 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3458
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003459- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3460 iterable object.
3461
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003462- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3463 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003464
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003465- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3466 authentication.
3467
3468- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3469 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003470
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003471- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003472 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3473 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3474 a sample driver.)
3475
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003476Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003477-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003478
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003479- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3480 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3481 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3482 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3483 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3484 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3485 kernel has large file support.
3486
3487- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3488 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3489 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3490 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3491 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3492
3493- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3494 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3495 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3496
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003497C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003498-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003499
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003500- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3501 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3502
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003503New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003505
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003506- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3507 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3508
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003509Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003511
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003512- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3513 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3514 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3515 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3516 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3517
3518- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3519 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3520 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3521 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3522
3523- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3524 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3525
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003526Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003528
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003529- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003530 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3531 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003532
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003533
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003534What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3535===========================
3536
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3538
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003539Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003541
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003542- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3543 big to represent as a C double.
3544
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003545- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3546 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3547 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3548 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3549 restriction).
3550
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003551- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3552 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3553 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3554 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3555 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3556
3557 >>> dir([])
3558 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3559 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3560 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3561 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3562 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3563 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3564 'reverse', 'sort']
3565
3566 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3567
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003568- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003569 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3570 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3571 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3572 OverflowError exception.
3573
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003574- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003575 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003576 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3577 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3578 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3579 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3580 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003581 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3583 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3584
3585 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3586 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3587 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3588 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003590- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003591 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3592 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3593 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3594 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3595 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3596 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3597 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3598 once it is created.
3599
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003600- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3601 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3602 (key, value) pairs.
3603
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003604- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003605 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3606 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3607
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003608- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3609 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3610 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3611 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3612 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003613
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003614- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003615 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3616 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3617
3618 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3619
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003620- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003621 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3622
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003623Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003625
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003626- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003627 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3628 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003629
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003630- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3631 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3632 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3633 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3634 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3635 in this area anymore).
3636
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003637- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3638 threading.Timer.
3639
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003640- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3641 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3642
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003643- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003644 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3645
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003646- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003647 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3648 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3649 converted to Python longs.
3650
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003651- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003652 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3653
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003654- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3655 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3656 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3657
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003658Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003660
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003661- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3662 division operators as per PEP 238.
3663
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003664Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003666
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003667- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3668 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3669 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3670 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3671
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003672C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003674
3675- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003676
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003677- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3678 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003679 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003680
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3682 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003683 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003685
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003686- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003687 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3688 module:
3689
3690 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003691
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003692 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3693 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003694
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003695 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3696 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003697
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003698 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3699
3700 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3701
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003702- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003703 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3704 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3705 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003706
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003707New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003708-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003709
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003710- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3711 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3712 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3713 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3714 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003715
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003716Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003718
3719Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003721
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003722- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3723 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3724 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3725 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003726 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3727 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3728 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3729 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3730 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003731
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003732- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003733 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3734
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003735
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003736What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3737===========================
3738
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3740
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003741Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003743
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003744- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3745 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3746
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003747- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3748 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3749 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003750
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003751- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3752 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3753 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3754 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003755
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003756- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3757
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003758- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003759
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003760Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003762
3763- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003764 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003765 the module docstring for details.
3766
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003767Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003769
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003770- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003771 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3772 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3773 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003774
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003775- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3776 Nick Mathewson.
3777
3778Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003780
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003781- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3782 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3783 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3784 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3785 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3786 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3787 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3788 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3789
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003790- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3791 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3792 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3793 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3794
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003795- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3796 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3797 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3798 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3799 come a long way).
3800
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003801- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3802 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3803 write filters for these warnings).
3804
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003805- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3806 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3807 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3808 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3809 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3810
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003811- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3812 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3813 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3814 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3815 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3816 older distribution.
3817
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003818Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003820
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003821- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3822 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003823 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003824
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003825- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3826 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3827 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3828
3829- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3830
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003831- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3832
3833- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3834
3835- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3836
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003838
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003839- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3840
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003841New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003843
3844C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003846
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003847- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3848 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3849 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3850 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3851 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3852 against buffer overruns.
3853
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003854- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003855 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3856 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003857 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3858 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3859 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3860
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003861- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3862 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3863 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3864 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3865 deprecated.
3866
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003867Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003868-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003869
3870- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3871 relevant is found.
3872
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003873
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003874What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003875===========================
3876
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003877*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3878
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003879Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003881
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003882- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3883 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3884 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3885 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3886 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3887 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3888 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3889 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003890 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003891 repaired.
3892
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003893- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003894 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003895 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3896 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3897 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3898 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3899 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3900 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3901 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3902 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3903
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003904- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3905 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3906 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3907 leading BMO character).
3908
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003909- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3910 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3911 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3912
3913 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3914 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3915 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003916
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003917 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3918 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3919 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3920 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3921 for various simple to use conversions.
3922
3923 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3924 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3925
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3927 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3928 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3929 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3930 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3931 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3932 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3933 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3934 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3935 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3936 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3937 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3938 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3939 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3940 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003941
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003942- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3943 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3944 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003945 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003946 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003947
3948 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003949 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3950 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3951 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3952 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3953 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003954 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3955 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003956
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003957 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3958 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3959 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003960 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003961
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003962- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3963 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3964 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3965 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3966 floating arithmetic,
3967
3968 x = 9007199254740992.0
3969 print long(x)
3970
3971 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3972 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3973 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3974 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3975 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3976 functions are of good quality).
3977
3978 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3979 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3980 algorithms to break.
3981
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003982- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3983 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3984 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3985 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3986 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3987 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3988 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3989 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3990 order.
3991
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003992- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3993 operation along the most common code paths.
3994
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003995- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3996 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3997
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003998- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3999 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4000 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4001 {}.update(UserDict())
4002
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004003- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4004 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4005 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4006 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4007 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4008 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4009 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4010 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4011
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004012- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004013 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004015 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004016 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4017 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004018 join() method of strings
4019 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004020 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4021 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004023 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004024
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004025- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4026 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4027
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004028- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4029 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4030
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004031- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4032 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4033 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4034 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4035
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004036- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4037 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004038 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004039 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4040 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004041
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004042- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4043
4044
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004045Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004047
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004048- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004049 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004050 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4051 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4052
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004053- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4054 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4055
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004056- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4057 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4058 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4059 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4060
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004061- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4062 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4063 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4064
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004065- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4066
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004067- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4068
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004069- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4070 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4071 that are still imported into string.py).
4072
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004073- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4074
4075- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4076 Now it does.
4077
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004078- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4079
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004080- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4081 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4082 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4083 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4084 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004085 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4086 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004087
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004088- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4089 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4090 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4091 'help(object)'.
4092
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004093Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004095
4096- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004097 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004098 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4099 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4100
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004101- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004102 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4103 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004104
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004105C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004107
4108- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4109 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110
4111----
4112
4113**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**