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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000015- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
16
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000017- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
18 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
19 arguments.
20
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000021- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
22 See SF bug #667147.
23
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000024Extension modules
25-----------------
26
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000027- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
28
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000029- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
30 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
31 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
32
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000033- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
34
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000035- datetime changes:
36
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +000037 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
38 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
39 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
40 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
41 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
42 now.
43
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000044 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000045 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
46 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000047
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000048 In dt.asdatetime(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000049 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000050 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
51 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
52 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
53 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000054
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000055 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
56 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
57 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000058 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
59
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000060 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
61 by a later example coded by Guido.
62
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000063 datetimetz.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
64 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
65 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
66 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
67 ends. See new docs for details.
68
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +000069 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
70 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
71 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
72 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
73 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
74
Neal Norwitzdf8b47f2003-01-10 20:57:54 +000075- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
76 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
77
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000078Library
79-------
80
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +000081- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
82 class.
83
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +000084- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
85 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
86 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
87
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +000088- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
89 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
90
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +000091- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
92 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
93 See SF bug #659228.
94
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +000095- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
96 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
97 See SF patch #651082.
98
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +000099- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000100
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000101- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
102 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
103
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000104Tools/Demos
105-----------
106
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000107TBD
108
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000109Build
110-----
111
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000112- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
113 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
114 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
115 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
116 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
117 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
118 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
119 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
120 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
121
122- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
123 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
124 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
125 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
126
127- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
128 from the Tools/scripts directory.
129
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000130C API
131-----
132
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000133TBD
134
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000135New platforms
136-------------
137
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000138TBD
139
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000140Tests
141-----
142
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000143TBD
144
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000145Windows
146-------
147
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000148- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
149 absolute pathname.
150
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000151- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
152 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
153
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000154Mac
155---
156
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000157TBD
158
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000159
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000160What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000161=================================
162
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000163*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000164
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000165Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000166--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000167
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000168- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
169
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000170- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
171 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000172 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000173 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000174 a different meaning than before.
175
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000176- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000177 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000178 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000179
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000180- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000181 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000182 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000183
184- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
185 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
186 and deallocation.
187
188- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
189 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
190
191- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
192 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
193 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
194 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
195 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
196
197- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
198 now detected by the garbage collector.
199
200- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
201 [SF bug 519621]
202
203- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
204 identifier.
205
206- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
207 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
208 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
209 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
210 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
211 [SF bug 563060]
212
213- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
214 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
215 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
216 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
217 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
218
219- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
220 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
221 not called. [SF bug #537450]
222
223- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
224
225- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
226 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
227 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
228 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
229 state of the slots would be lost.)
230
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000231Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000232-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000233
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000234- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000235 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
236 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
237 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
238 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000239 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
240 Jython 2.1.
241
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000242- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000243 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000244 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
245 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
246 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
247 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
248 these, see PEP 302.
249
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000250- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
251 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
252 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
253
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000254- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
255 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
256 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
257
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000258- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
259 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
260 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
261
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000262- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
263 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
264 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
265 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
266 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
267 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
268 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
269 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
270 releases or implementations.
271
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000272- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000273 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
274 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000275
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000276- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
277 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
278
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000279- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
280 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
281 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
282
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000283- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
284 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
285
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000286- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
287 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000288 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
289 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000290
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000291- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
292 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
293 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
294 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
295 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
296
297 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
298 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
299 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
300 pattern.
301
302 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
303 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
304 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
305 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
306
307 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
308 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
309 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
310 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
311 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
312 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
313
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000314- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
315 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
316 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
317 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
318 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
319 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
320 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
321 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000322
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000323- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
324 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
325 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
326 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
327 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000328 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
329 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
330 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
331 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
332 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
333 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
334 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000335
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000336- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
337 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
338
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000339- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
340 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
341 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
342 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
343 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
344 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
345 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
346 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
347 to Zack Weinberg!
348
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000349- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
350 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
351 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
352 type. This has been fixed now.
353
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000354- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
355 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
356 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
357
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000358- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
359 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
360 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
361 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
362 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
363 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
364 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
365 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000366 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000367
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000368- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
369 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
370 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000371
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000372- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
373 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
374 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
375 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
376 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
377 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
378 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
379 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000380 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000381 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
382 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
383
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000384- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
385 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
386 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
387 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
388 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
389 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
390 this.)
391
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000392- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
393 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000394 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000395 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000396 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
397 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000398 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
399 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000400
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000401- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
402 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
403 currently running.
404
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000405- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
406 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
407 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
408 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
409
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000410- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
411 as directory names.
412
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000413- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
414 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
415
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000416- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
417 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
418
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000419- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000420 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
421 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000422
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000423- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
424 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
425 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
426 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
427 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
428
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000429- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
430 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
431 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
432 removed.
433
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000434- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
435 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
436 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
437
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000438- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
439 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
440 to __debug__.
441
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000442- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
443 string to the left with zeros. For example,
444 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
445
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000446- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
447 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
448 deprecated now.
449
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000450- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
451 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
452 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000453
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000454- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
455 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
456 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
457 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
458 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000459
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000460- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
461 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
462
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000463- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
464 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
465 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000466 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000467 is backward compatible.
468
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000469- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
470 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
471 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
472 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
473 could access a pointer to freed memory.
474
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000475- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
476 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
477 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
478 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
479 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
480 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000481
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000482- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
483 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
484
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000485- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
486 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
487
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000488- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
489 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
490 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
491 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
492 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
493
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000494- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
495 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
496 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
497
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000498- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000499 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
500
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000501- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
502 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
503 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000504
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000505- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
506 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
507
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000508- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
509 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
510 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
511
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000512- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
513
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000514Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000515-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000516
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000517- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
518
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000519- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
520 archives.
521
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000522- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
523 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
524 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
525
526 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
527
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000528- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
529 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
530 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000531 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000532
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000533- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
534 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
535 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
536 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
537 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000538
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000539- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
540 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000541
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000542- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
543
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000544- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
545 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
546
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000547- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
548 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
549 supported.
550
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000551- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
552
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000553- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
554 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000555
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000556- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
557 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
558
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000559- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
560
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000561- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
562 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
563
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000564- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
565 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
566 functions but callable type objects.
567
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000568- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000569 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000570 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000571
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000572- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
573 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000574
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000575- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
576 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000577
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000578- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
579 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
580 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
581 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
582
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000583- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
584 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000585
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000586- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
587 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
588 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
589 and __imul__.
590
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000591- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000592 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
593 is called.
594
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000595- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
596 been added where available.
597
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000598- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
599 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
600 interpreter was compiled.
601
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000602- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
603 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
604 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000605 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000606 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
607 1, not 2.
608
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000609- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
610 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
611 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
612 limit.
613
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000614- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
615 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
616 bug #623464.
617
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000618- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
619 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
620 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
621 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
622
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000623Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000624-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000625
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000626- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
627
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000628- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
629 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
630 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
631 with Python 2.3a2.
632
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000633- os.path exposes getctime.
634
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000635- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
636 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
637 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
638 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
639 unit tests of floating point results.
640
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000641- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
642 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
643 has been increased.
644
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000645- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
646 executed.
647
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000648- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
649 postinstallation script.
650
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000651- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
652 test the current module.
653
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000654- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
655 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
656 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
657 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
658 this behavior needs to be controlled.
659
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000660- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000661 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000662 Ward's Optik package.
663
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000664- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
665 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
666 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
667 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
668
669- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
670 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000671 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000672
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000673- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
674 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
675 shelf are binary pickles.
676
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000677- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
678 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
679
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000680- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
681 modules are iterators now.
682
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000683- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
684 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
685 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
686 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
687 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
688 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000689
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000690- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
691 with their entity value.
692
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000693- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
694
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000695- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
696 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000697
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000698- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
699 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000700 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000701
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000702- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
703 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
704 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
705 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
706 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
707 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
708 main():
709
710 import locale
711 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
712
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000713- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
714 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
715
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000716- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
717 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
718 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
719 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
720 to the new standard.
721
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000722- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
723 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
724 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
725 an extension to the database.
726
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000727- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
728 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
729 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
730 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000731 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000732
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000733- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
734
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000735- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000736 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000737
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000738- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
739 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
740 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
741 bounded integers.
742
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000743- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
744 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
745 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
746 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
747 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
748 in existence.
749
750 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
751 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
752 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
753 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
754 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
755 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
756
757 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
758 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
759 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
760 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
761
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000762- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
763 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
764 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
765
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000766- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
767
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000768- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
769 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
770 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
771 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
772
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000773- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
774 argument.
775
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000776- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
777 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
778 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
779 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
780 [SF patch 560794].
781
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000782- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
783 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
784 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000785 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
786 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
787 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000788
789- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
790 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000791
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000792- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
793 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
794 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
795 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000796
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000797- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
798 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
799 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
800 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
801 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
802
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000803- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000804
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000805- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
806
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000807- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
808 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
809 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
810 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
811 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
812 identical to None.
813
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000814- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
815 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
816 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
817 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
818 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
819 results now.
820
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000821- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
822 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
823
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000824- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
825 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
826 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
827 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
828 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
829 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
830 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
831 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
832
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000833- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
834
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000835- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
836 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
837
838- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
839 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
840 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
841 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
842 and other systems.
843
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000844- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
845 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
846 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
847 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 +0000848 work well with these.
849
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000850- compileall now supports quiet operation.
851
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000852- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000853 connections.
854
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000855- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
856 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
857 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
858
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000859- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
860 sets
861
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000862- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
863 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
864 name.
865
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000866- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
867 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
868 passed in.
869
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000870- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000871 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000872 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
873 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000874
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000875- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
876
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000877- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
878
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000879- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
880 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
881 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
882
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000883- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
884 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
885 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
886 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000887 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000888
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000889- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000890 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000891 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000892
893- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
894 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
895 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
896
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000897- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000898 the value of its expression argument.
899
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000900- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
901 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
902 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
903
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000904- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
905 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
906 skipstone browser was included.
907
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000908- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
909 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
910
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000911Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000912-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000913
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000914- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
915 names in addition to accepting file names.
916
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000917- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
918 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
919 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
920 still used and useful.)
921
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000922- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
923 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
924 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
925 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000926
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000927- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
928 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
929 the generated binary.
930
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000931Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000932-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000933
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000934- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
935
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000936- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
937 except in the hands of experts.
938
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000939- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000940 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
941 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
942 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000943
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000944- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
945 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
946 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
947 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
948 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
949 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
950 builds.
951
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000952- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
953 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
954 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
955 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
956 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
957 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
958 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
959 new type.
960
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000961- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000962
963 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
964 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
965 positive infinities.
966
967 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
968 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
969 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
970 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
971 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
972 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
973 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
974
975 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
976
977 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
978
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000979- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
980 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
981 size of the executable.
982
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000983- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
984 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
985 configure script. On other platforms, remove
986 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000987
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000988- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
989
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000990- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
991 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
992 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000993
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000994- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
995 well as Unix.
996
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000997- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
998 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
999 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1000 modules in the README file for details.
1001
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001002C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001003-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001004
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001005- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1006 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001007 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001008 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001009 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001010
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001011- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1012 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1013 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1014 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1015 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1016 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1017 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1018 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1019 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1020 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1021 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1022 aligned.)
1023
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001024- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1025 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1026 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1027
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001028- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1029 level.
1030
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001031- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1032 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1033 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1034 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1035 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1036
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001037- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1038 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1039 code.
1040
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001041- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1042 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1043 adjusting for negative indices.
1044
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001045- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1046 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1047 object.
1048
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001049- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1050 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1051 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1052
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001053- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1054 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001055
1056- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1057
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001058- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1059 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1060 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1061 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1062
1063- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1064
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001065- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001066
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001067- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001068 without going through the buffer API.
1069
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001070- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001071
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001072- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1073 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1074 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1075 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1076
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001077- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1078 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1079
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001080- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001081 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1082
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001083New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001084-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001085
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001086- OpenVMS is now supported.
1087
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001088- AtheOS is now supported.
1089
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001090- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1091
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001092- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1093
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001094Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001095-----
1096
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001097- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1098 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1099 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001100
1101Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001102-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001103
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001104- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1105 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1106 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1107 bugs.
1108 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001109 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1110 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1111 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001112 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001113
1114- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001115 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001116
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001117- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1118 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1119
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001120- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1121 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1122 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1123 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1124
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001125- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1126 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1127 use files" uninstall option).
1128
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001129- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1130
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001131- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1132 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1133
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001134- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1135 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1136 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1137
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001138- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1139 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1140 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1141 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1142 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001143 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1144 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1145 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001146
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001147- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001148 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001149 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1150 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1151 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1152 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1153 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1154 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1155 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1156 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1157 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1158 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1159 work around.
1160
1161- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1162 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1163 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1164 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1165 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1166 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1167 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1168 specified with O_CREAT too).
1169
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001170Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001171----
1172
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001173- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001174
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001175- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1176 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1177 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1178
1179- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1180 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1181 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1182 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1183 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1184 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1185 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1186 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001187
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001188- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1189 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1190 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001191
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001192- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1193 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1194 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1195 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1196 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001197
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001198- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1199 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1200 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001201
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001202- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1203 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001204
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001205- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1206 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1207 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1208 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1209 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001210
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001211- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1212 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1213 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1214
1215- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1216 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1217 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001218
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001219- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1220 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1221 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1222 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1223 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001224
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001225- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1226 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001227
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001228- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1229 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001230
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001231- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1232 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1233 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1234 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001235
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001236What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001237===============================
1238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001239*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1240
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001241Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001242--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001243
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001244- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1245 with a custom metaclass.
1246
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001247Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001248-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001249
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001250- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1251 are proxies.
1252
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001253Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001254-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001255
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001256- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1257 very short strings.
1258
1259- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1260 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1261 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1262 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1263 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1264
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001265Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001266-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001267
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001268- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1269 close or delete time).
1270
1271- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1272 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1273
1274- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1275
1276- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001277 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001278
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001279Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001280-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001281
1282Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001283-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001284
1285C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001286-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001287
1288New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001289-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001290
1291Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001292-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001293
1294Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001295-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001296
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001297- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1298
1299- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1300 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1301
1302- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1303 deleted at process exit time.
1304
1305- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1306 in backslash.
1307
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001308Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001309----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001310
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001311- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1312 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1313 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1314
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001315
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001316What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001317===========================
1318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001319*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1320
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001321Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001322--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001323
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001324- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1325 been extensively updated. See
1326
1327 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1328
1329 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1330
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001331- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1332 deleted!
1333
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001334- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1335 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1336 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1337 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1338 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1339
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001340- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1341
1342 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1343 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1344
1345 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1346 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1347 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1348 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1349 supported anyway.
1350
1351 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1352 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1353
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001354- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1355 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1356 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1357 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1358 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001359
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001360- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1361 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1362 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1363
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001364Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001365-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001366
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001367- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1368 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1369 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1370 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1371 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1372 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001373 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1374 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1375 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1376 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001377
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001378- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1379 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1380 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1381
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001382Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001383-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001384
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001385- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1386
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001387Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001388-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001389
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001390- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1391 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1392 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1393 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1394 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1395 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1396
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001397- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1398
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001399- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1400
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001401- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1402
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001403- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1404 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1405 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1406
1407- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1408
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001409Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001410-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001411
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001412- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1413 off a search on Google.
1414
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001415Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001416-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001417
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001418- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1419 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1420 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1421 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1422 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1423 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1424 other platforms should do likewise.
1425
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001426- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1427 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1428 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1429
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001430C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001431-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001432
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001433- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1434 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1435 producing key-value pairs.
1436
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001437- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001438 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001439 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1440 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1441 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1442 previously went unchallenged.
1443
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001444New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001445-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001446
1447Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001448-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001449
1450Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001451-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001452
1453Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001454----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001455
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001456- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1457 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001458
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001459- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1460 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1461 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1462 home.
1463
1464
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001465What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001466===========================
1467
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001468*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1469
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001470Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001471--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001472
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001473- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1474 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001475
1476 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001477 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001478
1479 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1480 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001481 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001482 This needs to be documented.
1483
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001484- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1485 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1486
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001487- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1488 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1489 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1490
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001491- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1492 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1493
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001494- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1495 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1496 class forbids it).
1497
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001498- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1499 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1500 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1501
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001502- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1503
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001504Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001505-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001506
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001507- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1508 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001509 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001510
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001511- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1512 (like 1 + '').
1513
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001514Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001515-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001516
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001517- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1518 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1519 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1520 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001521 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001522 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1523
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001524- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1525 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1526 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1527 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1528
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001529- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1530 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001531 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1532 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1533 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001534
1535- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1536 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001537
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001538- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1539 bytes on its input.
1540
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001541Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001542-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001543
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001544- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001545 convenience function.
1546
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001547- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1548 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1549 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001550 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1551 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1552 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1553 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1554 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1555 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001556
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001557- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1558 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1559 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1560 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1561
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001562- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1563 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1564 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1565
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001566- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1567 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1568 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1569 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1570
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001571- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1572 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001573 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001574 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1575 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1576 new -l and -e options.
1577
1578- statcache is now deprecated.
1579
1580- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1581 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001582 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001583 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1584 time properly taken into account.
1585
1586- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1587 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1588 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1589 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1590
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001591Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001592-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001593
1594Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001595-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001596
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001597- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1598 is built with libdb3 if available.
1599
1600- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1601
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001602C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001603-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001604
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001605- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1606 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1607 PySequence_Size().
1608
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001609- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1610
1611- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1612 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1613 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1614
1615- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1616 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1617
1618- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1619 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1620
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001621New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001622-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001623
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001624- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1625 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1626
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001627- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1628 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1629
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001630- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1631
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001632Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001633-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001634
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001635- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1636 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1637
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001638Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001639-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001640
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001641Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001642----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001643
1644- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1645 removed completely in the next release.
1646
1647- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1648 OSX.
1649
1650- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1651 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1652
1653- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1654
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001655
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001656What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001657===========================
1658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001659*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1660
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001661Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001662--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001663
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001664- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001665 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001666 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001667 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1668 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001669 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1670 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001671 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1672 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001673
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001674- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1675 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1676
1677- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1678 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1679
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001680Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001681-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001682
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001683- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1684 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1685 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1686 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1687 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1688 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1689 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1690 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1691
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001692- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1693 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1694 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1695 example).
1696
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001697- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001698 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001699 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001700 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001701
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001702- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1703 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1704 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001705 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001706
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001707- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1708 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1709 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1710 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1711 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1712 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1713
1714 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1715
1716 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1717
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001718Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001719-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001720
1721- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1722
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001723- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1724
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001725- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1726 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001727
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001728- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1729 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1730 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1731 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1732 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1733 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001734 attributes.
1735
1736- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1737 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1738 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001739
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001740- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1741 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1742 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001743
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001744- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1745 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1746 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001747 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1748 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1749
1750- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1751 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001752
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001753Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001754-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001755
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001756- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1757 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1758
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001759- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1760 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1761 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1762 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1763
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001764- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1765 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1766 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1767 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1768
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001769 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1770 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1771 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1772 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1773 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1774 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1775 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1776 without losing information).
1777
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001778- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001779 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1780 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1781 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1782 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1783 module).
1784
1785 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1786 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1787 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1788 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1789 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001790
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001791- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001792 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1793 encoding.
1794
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001795- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1796 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1797
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001798- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001799 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1800
1801- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1802 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1803 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1804 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1805
1806- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1807
1808- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1809 ON, and OFF.
1810
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001811- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1812 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1813
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001814Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001815-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001816
1817- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1818 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1819 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001820
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001821- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1822 been added: -X and -E.
1823
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001824Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001825-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001826
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001827- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1828 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1829
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001831-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001832
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001833- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1834 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1835 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1836 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1837 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1838
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001839- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1840 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1841 as long) arguments.
1842
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001843- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1844 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1845 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1846 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1847 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1848 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1849
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001850- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1851 input.
1852
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001853New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001854-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001855
1856Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001857-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001858
1859Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001860-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001861
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001862- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1863 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1864 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1865
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001866- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1867 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1868 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001869 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001870
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001871 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1872 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1873 import signal
1874 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001875
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001876 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001877 while 1:
1878 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001879 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001880 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1881 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1882 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1883 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001884
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001885
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001886What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1887===========================
1888
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001889*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1890
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001891Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001892--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001893
1894- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1895 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1896 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1897
1898- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1899 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1900 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1901 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1902 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1903 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1904 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001905
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001906- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001907 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001908 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1909 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1910 associate a docstring with a property.
1911
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001912- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1913 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1914 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1915 other built-in object types.
1916
1917- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1918 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1919 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1920 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1921 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1922
1923- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1924 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1925
1926- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1927 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001928 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001929 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1930 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1931 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1932 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1933 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1934
1935- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1936 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1937 class.
1938
1939- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1940 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1941 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1942 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1943
1944- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1945 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1946 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1947 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1948
1949- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1950 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1951
1952- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1953 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1954 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1955 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1956 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001957 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001958 with the same value as s.
1959
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001960- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1961
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001962Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001963----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001964
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001965- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1966
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001967- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1968 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1969 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1970 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1971 objects.
1972
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001973- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1974 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001975 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1976 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1977
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001978- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1979 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1980 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1981
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001982Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001983-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001984
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001985- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1986 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1987 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1988 by the instances.
1989
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001990- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1991 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1992 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1993
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001994- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1995 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1996 before the entire comparison is complete.
1997
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001998- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1999 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2000 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2001
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002002- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2003 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2004 getwriter().
2005
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002006- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2007 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2008
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002009- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002010 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2011 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2012
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002013- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2014 iterable object.
2015
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002016- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2017 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002018
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002019- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2020 authentication.
2021
2022- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2023 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002024
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002025- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002026 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2027 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2028 a sample driver.)
2029
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002030Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002031-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002032
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002033- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2034 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2035 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2036 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2037 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2038 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2039 kernel has large file support.
2040
2041- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2042 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2043 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2044 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2045 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2046
2047- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2048 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2049 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2050
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002051C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002052-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002053
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002054- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2055 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2056
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002057New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002058-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002059
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002060- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2061 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2062
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002063Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002064-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002065
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002066- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2067 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2068 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2069 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2070 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2071
2072- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2073 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2074 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2075 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2076
2077- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2078 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2079
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002080Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002081-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002082
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002083- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002084 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2085 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002086
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002087
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002088What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2089===========================
2090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002091*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2092
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002093Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002094----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002095
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002096- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2097 big to represent as a C double.
2098
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002099- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2100 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2101 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2102 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2103 restriction).
2104
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002105- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2106 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2107 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2108 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2109 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2110
2111 >>> dir([])
2112 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2113 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2114 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2115 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2116 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2117 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2118 'reverse', 'sort']
2119
2120 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2121
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002122- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002123 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2124 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2125 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2126 OverflowError exception.
2127
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002128- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002129 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002130 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2131 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2132 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2133 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2134 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002135 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002136 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2137 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2138
2139 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2140 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2141 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2142 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002143
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002144- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002145 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2146 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2147 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2148 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2149 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2150 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2151 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2152 once it is created.
2153
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002154- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2155 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2156 (key, value) pairs.
2157
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002158- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002159 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2160 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2161
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002162- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2163 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2164 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2165 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2166 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002167
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002168- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002169 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2170 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2171
2172 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2173
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002174- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002175 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2176
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002177Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002178-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002179
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002180- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002181 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2182 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002183
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002184- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2185 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2186 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2187 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2188 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2189 in this area anymore).
2190
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002191- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2192 threading.Timer.
2193
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002194- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2195 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2196
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002197- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002198 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2199
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002200- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002201 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2202 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2203 converted to Python longs.
2204
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002205- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002206 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2207
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002208- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2209 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2210 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2211
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002212Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002213-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002214
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002215- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2216 division operators as per PEP 238.
2217
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002218Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002219-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002220
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002221- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2222 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2223 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2224 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2225
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002226C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002227-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002228
2229- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002230
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002231- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2232 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002233 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002234
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002235 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2236 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002237 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002238 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002239
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002240- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002241 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2242 module:
2243
2244 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002245
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002246 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2247 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002248
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002249 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2250 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002251
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002252 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2253
2254 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2255
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002256- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002257 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2258 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2259 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002260
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002261New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002262-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002263
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002264- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2265 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2266 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2267 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2268 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002269
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002270Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002271-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002272
2273Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002274-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002275
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002276- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2277 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2278 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2279 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002280 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2281 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2282 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2283 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2284 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002285
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002286- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002287 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2288
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002289
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002290What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2291===========================
2292
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002293*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2294
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002295Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002296-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002297
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002298- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2299 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2300
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002301- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2302 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2303 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002304
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002305- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2306 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2307 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2308 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002309
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002310- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2311
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002312- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002313
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002314Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002315-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002316
2317- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002318 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002319 the module docstring for details.
2320
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002321Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002322-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002323
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002324- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002325 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2326 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2327 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002328
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002329- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2330 Nick Mathewson.
2331
2332Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002333----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002334
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002335- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2336 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2337 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2338 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2339 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2340 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2341 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2342 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2343
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002344- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2345 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2346 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2347 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2348
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002349- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2350 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2351 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2352 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2353 come a long way).
2354
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002355- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2356 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2357 write filters for these warnings).
2358
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002359- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2360 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2361 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2362 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2363 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2364
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002365- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2366 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2367 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2368 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2369 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2370 older distribution.
2371
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002372Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002373-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002374
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002375- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2376 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002377 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002378
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002379- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2380 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2381 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2382
2383- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2384
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002385- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2386
2387- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2388
2389- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2390
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002391- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002392
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002393- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2394
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002395New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002397
2398C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002399-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002400
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002401- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2402 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2403 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2404 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2405 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2406 against buffer overruns.
2407
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002408- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002409 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2410 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002411 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2412 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2413 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2414
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002415- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2416 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2417 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2418 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2419 deprecated.
2420
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002421Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002422-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002423
2424- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2425 relevant is found.
2426
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002427
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002428What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002429===========================
2430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002431*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2432
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002433Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002434----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002435
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002436- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2437 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2438 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2439 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2440 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2441 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2442 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2443 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002444 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002445 repaired.
2446
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002447- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002448 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002449 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2450 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2451 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2452 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2453 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2454 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2455 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2456 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2457
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002458- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2459 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2460 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2461 leading BMO character).
2462
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002463- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2464 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2465 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2466
2467 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2468 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2469 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002470
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002471 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2472 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2473 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2474 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2475 for various simple to use conversions.
2476
2477 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2478 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2479
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002480 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2481 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2482 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2483 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2484 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2485 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2486 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2487 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2488 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2489 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2490 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2491 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2492 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2493 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2494 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002495
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002496- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2497 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2498 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002499 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002500 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002501
2502 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002503 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2504 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2505 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2506 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2507 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002508 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2509 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002510
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002511 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2512 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2513 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002514 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002515
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002516- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2517 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2518 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2519 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2520 floating arithmetic,
2521
2522 x = 9007199254740992.0
2523 print long(x)
2524
2525 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2526 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2527 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2528 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2529 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2530 functions are of good quality).
2531
2532 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2533 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2534 algorithms to break.
2535
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002536- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2537 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2538 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2539 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2540 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2541 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2542 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2543 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2544 order.
2545
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002546- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2547 operation along the most common code paths.
2548
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002549- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2550 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2551
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002552- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2553 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2554 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2555 {}.update(UserDict())
2556
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002557- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2558 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2559 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2560 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2561 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2562 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2563 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2564 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2565
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002566- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002567 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002568
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002569 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002570 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2571 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002572 join() method of strings
2573 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002574 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2575 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002576 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002577 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002578
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002579- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2580 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2581
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002582- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2583 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2584
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002585- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2586 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2587 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2588 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2589
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002590- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2591 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002592 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002593 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2594 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002595
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002596- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2597
2598
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002599Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002600-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002601
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002602- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002603 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002604 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2605 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2606
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002607- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2608 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2609
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002610- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2611 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2612 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2613 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2614
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002615- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2616 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2617 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2618
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002619- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2620
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002621- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2622
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002623- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2624 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2625 that are still imported into string.py).
2626
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002627- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2628
2629- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2630 Now it does.
2631
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002632- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2633
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002634- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2635 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2636 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2637 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2638 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002639 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2640 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002641
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002642- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2643 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2644 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2645 'help(object)'.
2646
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002647Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002649
2650- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002651 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002652 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2653 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2654
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002655- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002656 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2657 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002658
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002659C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002660-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002661
2662- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2663 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002664
2665----
2666
2667**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**