blob: ff1e426aba2654fe7fde96eb912e3a003f592ef9 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000015- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
16 over a sequence.
17
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000018- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
19
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000020- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
21 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
22 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
23 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
24 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
25 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
26 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
27 records with equal keys is unchanged).
28
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000029- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
30 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000031
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000032- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
33 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
34 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
35
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000036- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
37 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
38 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
39 freelist.
40
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000041- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
42 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
43
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000044- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
45 number.
46
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000047- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
48 a TypeError exception.
49
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000050- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
51 820195.
52
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +000053- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
54 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
55 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
56
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000057Extension modules
58-----------------
59
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +000060- os.getsid was added.
61
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +000062- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
63 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
64 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
65
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +000066- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
67
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000068- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
69
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000070- readline.clear_history was added.
71
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000072- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
73
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000074- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
75
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000076- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
77
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000078- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
79
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000080- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
81
82- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
83
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +000084- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
85
86- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
87
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +000088- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
89 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
90 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
91
92- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
93 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
94 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
95 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
96 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
97 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
98 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
99
100- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
101 iterators from a single iterable.
102
103- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
104 of raising a TypeError exception.
105
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000106Library
107-------
108
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000109- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
110
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000111- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
112 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
113
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000114- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
115
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000116- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
117 a string).
118
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000119- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
120
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000121- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
122
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000123- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
124
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000125- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
126
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000127- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
128 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
129 list of fieldnames.
130
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000131- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
132 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
133
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000134- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
135
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000136- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
137 empty lists.
138
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000139- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
140 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
141 and shelves.
142
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000143- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
144 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
145
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000146- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000147 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
148 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000149
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000150- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
151 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
152 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
153 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000154
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000155- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000156 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
157 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
158
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000159- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
160 and removed in Py2.4.
161
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000162- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
163
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000164Tools/Demos
165-----------
166
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000167- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
168
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000169- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
170 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
171 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
172 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
173
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000174- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
175
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000176- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
177 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
178 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
179 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
180 now.
181
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000182- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
183 in effect
184
185- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
186 C-c C-h
187
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000188- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
189 -d option was given.
190
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000191Build
192-----
193
194C API
195-----
196
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000197- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
198 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
199
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000200- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
201 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
202 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
203 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
204
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000205New platforms
206-------------
207
208Tests
209-----
210
211Windows
212-------
213
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000214- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
215 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
216 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
217
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000218Mac
219----
220
221
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000222What's New in Python 2.3 final?
223===============================
224
225*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
226
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000227IDLE
228----
229
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000230- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
231 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
232 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
233 context-menu actions.
234
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000235- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
236 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
237 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
238 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
239 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
240 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
241 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
242 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
243 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
244
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000245
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000246What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
247=============================================
248
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000249*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000250
251Core and builtins
252-----------------
253
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000254- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000255 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000256 comment at the end are still unsupported.
257
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000258Extension modules
259-----------------
260
261- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
262 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
263 than once. This has been fixed.
264
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000265- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
266 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
267 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
268 call.
269
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000270- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
271
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000272Library
273-------
274
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000275- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
276 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
277
278- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
279 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
280 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
281 restored.
282
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000283IDLE
284----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000285
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000286- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000287
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000288Build
289-----
290
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000291- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
292 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
293
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000294C API
295-----
296
297Windows
298-------
299
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000300- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
301 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
302
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000303- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
304
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000305Mac
306---
307
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000308- Various fixes to pimp.
309
310- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
311
312- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
313 more problems than it solves.
314
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000315
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000316What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
317=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000318
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000319*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
320
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000321Core and builtins
322-----------------
323
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000324- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
325 by sys.setcheckinterval().
326
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000327- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
328 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000329 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000330
331- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
332 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
333 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000334 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000335
336- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
337 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000338
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000339- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
340 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
341 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
342
343- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000344 770247.
345
346- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000347
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000348Extension modules
349-----------------
350
351- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
352 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
353
354- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
355
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000356- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
357
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000358- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
359 contained within the _strptime module.
360
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000361- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
362 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
363
364- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000365 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
366
367- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
368 the find_class attribute, if present.
369
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000370- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000371
372 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
373 (SF bug 763298).
374
375 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000376 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
377 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
378 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000379
380 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
381
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000382Library
383-------
384
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000385- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
386
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000387- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
388 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
389 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
390 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
391 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
392 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
393 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
394 or Tester().
395
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000396- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
397 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
398 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
399 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
400 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
401 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
402 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
403 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
404 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000405
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000406 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000407
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000408- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
409 weren't before was an oversight.
410
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000411- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
412 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
413
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000414- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
415 when there are no lines.
416
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000417- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
418 which could occur with Tk 8.4
419
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000420- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
421 to child processes.
422
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000423- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
424
425- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
426
427- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
428 xmlrpclib.
429
430- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
431 responses.
432
433- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
434 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
435
436- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
437 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
438 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
439
440- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
441 used as patterns.
442
443- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
444 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
445 than Tk 8.3.
446
447- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
448
449- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000450
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000451Tools/Demos
452-----------
453
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000454- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
455
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000456- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
457
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000458- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000459
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000460Build
461-----
462
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000463- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
464
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000465- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
466
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000467- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
468 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000469
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000470- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
471 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
472 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000473
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000474C API
475-----
476
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000477- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
478 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
479
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000480Windows
481-------
482
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000483- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
484 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
485 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
486 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
487 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
488 Python exception ::
489
490 thread.error: can't start new thread
491
492 is raised now.
493
494- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
495 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
496 instead of from DLL teardown.
497
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000498Mac
499---
500
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000501- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000502 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000503 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
504 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
505 the executable in the bundle.
506
507- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000508
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000509- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
510
511- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
512 on Panther.
513
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000514What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
515================================
516
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000517*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000518
519Core and builtins
520-----------------
521
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000522- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
523 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
524 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
525 with the -i option.
526
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000527- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
528 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
529
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000530- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
531 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
532
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000533- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
534 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
535 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
536 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
537 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
538 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
539 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
540 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
541 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
542 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
543 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
544 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
545 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000546
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000547- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
548 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
549 embedded in a lambda expression.
550
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000551- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
552 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
553 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
554 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
555 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
556
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000557- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
558 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
559 matches the restriction on classic classes.
560
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000561- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
562 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
563
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000564- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
565 It's writable again.
566
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000567- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
568 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
569 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000570 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000571
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000572- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
573 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
574 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
575
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000576Extension modules
577-----------------
578
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000579- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
580 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
581
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000582- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
583 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
584 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
585 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
586
587- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
588 collection.
589
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000590- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
591 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
592 unique within a single program run.
593
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000594- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
595 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
596
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000597- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
598 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
599
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000600- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
601 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000602
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000603- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
604
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000605- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
606 Fixes SF bug #730685.
607
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000608- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
609 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
610 for many BSD-derived systems.
611
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000612
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000613Library
614-------
615
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000616- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
617 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
618 primary ones:
619
620 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
621 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
622 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
623
624 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
625 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
626 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
627 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
628 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
629 framework features (which doctest lacks).
630
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000631- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
632 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
633 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
634 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
635 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
636 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
637 argument.
638
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000639- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
640 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
641 in the archive.
642
643- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
644 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
645
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000646- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
647 569574).
648
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000649- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
650 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
651 no more.
652
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000653- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
654 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
655 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
656 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
657 code coverage.
658
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000659- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
660 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
661 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000662 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
663 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000664
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000665- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
666 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
667 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000668 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000669
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000670- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
671
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000672- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
673 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
674 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
675 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
676
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000677- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
678 handling.
679
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000680- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
681 __doc__ of data descriptors.
682
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000683- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
684 in socket.py.
685
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000686- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
687
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000688- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
689 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
690 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
691 opener with proxy support.
692
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000693- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
694
695- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
696
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000697Tools/Demos
698-----------
699
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000700- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
701
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000702- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
703
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000704- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
705 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000706
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000707- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
708 files.
709
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000710Build
711-----
712
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000713- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000714 different root directory.
715
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000716C API
717-----
718
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000719- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
720 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
721 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
722 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
723 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
724 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
725 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
726 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
727 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
728 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
729
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000730- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
731 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
732 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
733 from Python.
734
735
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000736New platforms
737-------------
738
739None this time.
740
741Tests
742-----
743
744- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
745 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
746
747Windows
748-------
749
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000750- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
751
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000752- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
753 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
754 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
755 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
756 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
757 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
758 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
759 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
760 that's what it's for.
761
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000762Mac
763---
764
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000765- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
766 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
767 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
768 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000769- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
770 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
771- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000772
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000773SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
774------------------------------------
775
776430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
777598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
778622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
779661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
780683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
781697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
782713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
783724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
784727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
785729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
786730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
787731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
788732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
789733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
790735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
791740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
792744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
793745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
794747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
795749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
796751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
797753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
798755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
799757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
800760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
801
802
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000803What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
804================================
805
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000806*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000807
808Core and builtins
809-----------------
810
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000811- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
812 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
813
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000814- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
815 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
816 and cannot be strings).
817
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000818- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
819 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
820 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
821 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
822
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000823- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
824 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
825 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
826 Python itself.
827
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000828- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
829 the referenced object, if it has one.
830
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000831- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
832 the thread started at
833 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
834
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000835- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
836 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
837 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
838 placed on a list index.
839
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000840- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
841 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
842 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
843 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
844
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000845- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
846 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
847 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
848 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
849 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
850 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
851 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
852
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000853- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
854 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
855 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
856 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
857 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
858
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000859- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
860 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000861
862- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
863 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
864 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
865 #693195.)
866
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000867- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
868 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000869
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000870- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000871 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000872 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
873 interpreter executions, would fail.
874
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000875- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000876 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000877 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000878
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000879Extension modules
880-----------------
881
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000882- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
883 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
884 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
885 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
886
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000887- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
888 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
889
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000890- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
891 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
892 and Greg Chapman.)
893
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000894- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
895 recursively.
896
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000897- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000898 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
899 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
900 leaks.
901
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000902- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
903
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000904- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
905 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
906 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
907 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
908 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
909 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
910 #705836.
911
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000912- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000913 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
914
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000915- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
916 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
917 See SF bug #692416.
918
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000919- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
920 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
921
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000922- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
923 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
924 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000925
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000926- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000927 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
928 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
929
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000930- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
931 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
932 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
933 timeouts to work properly.
934
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000935Library
936-------
937
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000938- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
939 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
940 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
941 future release.
942
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000943- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
944 for querying platform dependent features.
945
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000946- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000947
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000948- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
949 pickle protocol versions.
950
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000951- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
952 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
953 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
954
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000955- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
956
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000957- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
958 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
959 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
960 modules.
961
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000962- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
963 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
964 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
965
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000966- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
967 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
968
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000969- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
970 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
971 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
972
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000973- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000974 MS Office extensions.
975
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000976- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
977 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
978
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000979- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
980 execution speed of expressions and statements.
981
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000982- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
983 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
984 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
985 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
986 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
987 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
988
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000989- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
990 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
991 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000992
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000993- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
994 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
995 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
996
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000997- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
998
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000999- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1000 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1001 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1002
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001003Tools/Demos
1004-----------
1005
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001006- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1007 See the module docstring for details.
1008
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001009Build
1010-----
1011
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001012- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1013 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001014
1015C API
1016-----
1017
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001018- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1019
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001020- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1021 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1022 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1023
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001024- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1025 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001026
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001027 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1028 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1029 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001030
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001031- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001032 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1033
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001034- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1035 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1036 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001037
1038New platforms
1039-------------
1040
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001041None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001042
1043Tests
1044-----
1045
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001046- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1047 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001048
1049Windows
1050-------
1051
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001052- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1053 function.
1054
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001055- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1056 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001057
1058Mac
1059---
1060
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001061- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1062 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001063
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001064- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1065 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001066
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001067- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1068 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1069 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001070
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001071- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001072 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1073 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001074
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001075- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1076 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001077
1078
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001079What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1080=================================
1081
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001082*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001083
1084Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001085-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001086
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001087- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1088 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1089 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1090
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001091- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1092 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1093 (SF patch #664376.)
1094
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001095- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1096 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1097 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1098 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1099 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1100 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001101 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001102
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001103- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1104 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1105 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1106 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001107 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001108
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001109- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1110 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1111 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1112 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1113 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1114 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1115 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1116 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1117 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1118 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1119 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1120
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001121- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1122 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1123 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1124 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1125 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1126 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1127
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001128- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1129 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1130
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001131- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1132 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1133 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1134 case.)
1135
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001136- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1137 passed as unicode strings.
1138
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001139- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1140 See SF bug #683467.
1141
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001142- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1143 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1144
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001145- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1146
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001147- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1148
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001149- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1150 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1151 arguments.
1152
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001153- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1154 See SF bug #667147.
1155
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001156- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001157 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001158 See SF bug #676155.
1159
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001160- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001161 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001162 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1163 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1164 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1165 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1166 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1167 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001168
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001169Extension modules
1170-----------------
1171
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001172- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1173 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1174 tp_as_number pointer.
1175
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001176- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1177 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1178 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1179 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1180 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1181
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001182- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1183
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001184- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1185
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001186- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001187 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001188 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1189 patch #678531.)
1190
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001191- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1192 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1193
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001194- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1195 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1196
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001197- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1198
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001199- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1200 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1201 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1202
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001203- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1204
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001205- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1206 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1207
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001208- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001209
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001210- datetime changes:
1211
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001212 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1213
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001214 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1215 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1216 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1217 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1218 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1219 now.
1220
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001221 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001222 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1223 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001224
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001225 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001226 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001227 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1228 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1229 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1230 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001231
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001232 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1233 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1234 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001235 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1236
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001237 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1238 by a later example coded by Guido.
1239
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001240 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001241 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1242 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1243 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001244 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1245 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1246
1247 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1248 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1249 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1250 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1251 tzinfo subclass instance.
1252
1253 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1254 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1255 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1256 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1257 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1258 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1259 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1260 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001261
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001262 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1263 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1264 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1265 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1266 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001267 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1268
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001269 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001270
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001271 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1272 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1273 as a naive datetime object.
1274
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001275 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1276 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1277 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1278
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001279 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1280 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1281 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1282 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1283 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1284 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1285 comparison.
1286
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001287 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1288 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1289 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1290 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001291 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001292
1293 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001294
1295 and ::
1296
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001297 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1298
1299 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1300 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1301 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1302 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1303
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001304 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1305 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1306 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1307 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1308 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1309
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001310 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1311 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001312 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1313 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001314
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001315Library
1316-------
1317
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001318- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1319 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1320
1321- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1322 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1323 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1324 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1325 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1326 See PEP 307 for details.
1327
1328- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1329 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1330
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001331- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1332 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001333 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001334 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1335 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001336 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001337
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001338- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1339 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1340
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001341- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1342 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1343 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1344
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001345- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1346
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001347- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1348 exception.
1349
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001350- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1351 class.
1352
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001353- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1354 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1355 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1356
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001357- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1358 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1359
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001360- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001361 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1362 See SF bug #659228.
1363
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001364- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1365 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1366 See SF patch #651082.
1367
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001368- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001369
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001370- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1371 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1372
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001373- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001374 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001375
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001376- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1377 DOS paths from other platforms.
1378
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001379Tools/Demos
1380-----------
1381
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001382- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1383 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1384 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1385 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1386 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1387 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1388 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1389 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1390 example:
1391
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001392 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1393 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001394
1395 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1396
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001397
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001398Build
1399-----
1400
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001401- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1402 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1403 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001404 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1405
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001406 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1407
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001408- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1409 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1410 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1411 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1412 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1413 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1414 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1415 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1416 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1417
1418- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1419 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1420 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1421 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1422
1423- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1424 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1425
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001426C API
1427-----
1428
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001429- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1430 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001431
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001432- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1433 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1434 tp_as_number pointer.
1435
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001436- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1437 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1438 (SF #681367)
1439
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001440- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1441 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1442 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1443 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001444
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001445Tests
1446-----
1447
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001448- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001449 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1450 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1451 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1452 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1453 pydoc.)
1454
1455- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1456
1457- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001459Windows
1460-------
1461
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001462- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1463 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1464 time).
1465
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001466- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1467 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1468
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001469- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1470 release without strong cryptography.
1471
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001472- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001473 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001474
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001475- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1476 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1477
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001478Mac
1479---
1480
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001481- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1482 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001483
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001484- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1485 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1486 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001487
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001488- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1489 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001490
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001491- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1492 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1493 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1494 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001495
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001496- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001497 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1498 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1499 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001500
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001502What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001503=================================
1504
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001505*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001506
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001507Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001508--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001509
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001510- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1511
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001512- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1513 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001514 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001515 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001516 a different meaning than before.
1517
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001518- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001519 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001520 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001521
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001522- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001523 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001524 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001525
1526- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1527 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1528 and deallocation.
1529
1530- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1531 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1532
1533- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1534 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1535 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1536 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1537 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1538
1539- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1540 now detected by the garbage collector.
1541
1542- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1543 [SF bug 519621]
1544
1545- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1546 identifier.
1547
1548- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1549 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1550 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1551 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1552 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1553 [SF bug 563060]
1554
1555- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1556 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1557 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1558 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1559 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1560
1561- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1562 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1563 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1564
1565- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1566
1567- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1568 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1569 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1570 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1571 state of the slots would be lost.)
1572
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001573Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001574-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001575
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001576- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001577 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1578 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1579 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1580 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001581 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1582 Jython 2.1.
1583
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001584- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001585 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001586 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1587 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1588 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1589 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1590 these, see PEP 302.
1591
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001592- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1593 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1594 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1595
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001596- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1597 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1598 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1599
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001600- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1601 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1602 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1603
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001604- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1605 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1606 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1607 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1608 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1609 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1610 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1611 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1612 releases or implementations.
1613
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001614- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001615 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1616 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001617
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001618- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1619 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1620
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001621- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1622 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1623 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1624
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001625- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1626 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1627
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001628- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1629 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001630 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1631 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001632
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001633- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1634 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1635 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1636 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1637 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1638
1639 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1640 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1641 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1642 pattern.
1643
1644 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1645 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1646 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1647 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1648
1649 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1650 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1651 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1652 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1653 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1654 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1655
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001656- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1657 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1658 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1659 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1660 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1661 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1662 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1663 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001664
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001665- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1666 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1667 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1668 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1669 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001670 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1671 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1672 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1673 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1674 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1675 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1676 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001677
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001678- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1679 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1680
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001681- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1682 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1683 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1684 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1685 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1686 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1687 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1688 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1689 to Zack Weinberg!
1690
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001691- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1692 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1693 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1694 type. This has been fixed now.
1695
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001696- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1697 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1698 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1699
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001700- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1701 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1702 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1703 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1704 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1705 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1706 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1707 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001708 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001709
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001710- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1711 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1712 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001713
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001714- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1715 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1716 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1717 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1718 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1719 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1720 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1721 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001722 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001723 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1724 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1725
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001726- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1727 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1728 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1729 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1730 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1731 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1732 this.)
1733
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001734- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1735 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001736 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001737 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001738 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1739 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001740 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1741 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001742
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001743- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1744 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1745 currently running.
1746
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001747- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1748 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1749 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1750 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1751
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001752- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1753 as directory names.
1754
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001755- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1756 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1757
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001758- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1759 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1760
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001761- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001762 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1763 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001764
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001765- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1766 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1767 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1768 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1769 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1770
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001771- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1772 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1773 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1774 removed.
1775
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001776- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1777 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1778 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1779
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001780- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1781 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1782 to __debug__.
1783
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001784- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1785 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1786 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1787
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001788- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1789 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1790 deprecated now.
1791
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001792- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1793 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1794 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001795
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001796- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1797 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1798 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1799 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1800 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001801
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001802- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1803 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1804
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001805- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1806 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1807 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001808 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001809 is backward compatible.
1810
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001811- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1812 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1813 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1814 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1815 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1816
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001817- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1818 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1819 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1820 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1821 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1822 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001823
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001824- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1825 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1826
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001827- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1828 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1829
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001830- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1831 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1832 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1833 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1834 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1835
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001836- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1837 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1838 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1839
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001840- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001841 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1842
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001843- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1844 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1845 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001846
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001847- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1848 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1849
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001850- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1851 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1852 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1853
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001854- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1855
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001856Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001857-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001858
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001859- Added three operators to the operator module:
1860 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1861 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1862 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1863
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001864- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1865
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001866- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1867 archives.
1868
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001869- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1870 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1871 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1872
1873 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1874
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001875- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1876 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1877 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001878 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001879
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001880- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1881 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1882 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1883 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001884 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1885 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1886 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1887 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001888
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001889- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1890 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001891
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001892- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1893
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001894- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1895 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1896
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001897- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1898 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1899 supported.
1900
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001901- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1902
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001903- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1904 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001905
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001906- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1907 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1908
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001909- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1910
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001911- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1912 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1913
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001914- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1915 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1916 functions but callable type objects.
1917
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001918- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001919 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001920 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001921
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001922- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1923 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001924
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001925- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1926 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001927
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001928- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1929 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1930 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1931 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1932
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001933- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1934 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001935
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001936- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1937 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1938 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1939 and __imul__.
1940
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001941- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001942 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1943 is called.
1944
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001945- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1946 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1947 interpreter was compiled.
1948
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001949- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1950 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1951 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001952 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001953 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1954 1, not 2.
1955
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001956- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1957 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1958 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1959 limit.
1960
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001961- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1962 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1963 bug #623464.
1964
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001965- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1966 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1967 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1968 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1969
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001970Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001971-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001972
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001973- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1974
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001975- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1976 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1977 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1978 with Python 2.3a2.
1979
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001980- os.path exposes getctime.
1981
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001982- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001983 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001984 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001985 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001986 unit tests of floating point results.
1987
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001988- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1989 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1990 has been increased.
1991
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001992- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1993 executed.
1994
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001995- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1996 postinstallation script.
1997
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001998- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1999 test the current module.
2000
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002001- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002002 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2003 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2004 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2005 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2006
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002007- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002008 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002009 Ward's Optik package.
2010
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002011- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2012 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2013 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2014 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2015
2016- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2017 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002018 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002019
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002020- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2021 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2022 shelf are binary pickles.
2023
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002024- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2025 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2026
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002027- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2028 modules are iterators now.
2029
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002030- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2031 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2032 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2033 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2034 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2035 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002036
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002037- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2038 with their entity value.
2039
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002040- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2041
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002042- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2043 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002044
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002045- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2046 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002047 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002048
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002049- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2050 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2051 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2052 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2053 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2054 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2055 main():
2056
2057 import locale
2058 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2059
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002060- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2061 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2062
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002063- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2064 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2065 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2066 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2067 to the new standard.
2068
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002069- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2070 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2071 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2072 an extension to the database.
2073
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002074- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2075 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2076 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2077 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002078 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002079
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002080- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002081 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002082
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002083- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2084 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2085 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2086 bounded integers.
2087
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002088- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2089 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2090 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2091 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2092 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2093 in existence.
2094
2095 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2096 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2097 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2098 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2099 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2100 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2101
2102 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2103 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2104 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2105 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2106
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002107- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2108 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2109 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2110
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002111- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2112
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002113- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2114 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2115 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2116 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2117
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002118- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2119 argument.
2120
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002121- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2122 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2123 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2124 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2125 [SF patch 560794].
2126
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002127- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2128 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2129 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002130 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2131 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2132 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002133
2134- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2135 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002136
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002137- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2138 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2139 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2140 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002141
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002142- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2143 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2144 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2145 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2146 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2147
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002148- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002149
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002150- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2151
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002152- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2153 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2154 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2155 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2156 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2157 identical to None.
2158
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002159- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2160 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2161 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2162 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2163 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2164 results now.
2165
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002166- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2167 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2168
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002169- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2170 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2171 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2172 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2173 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2174 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2175 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2176 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2177
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002178- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2179
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002180- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2181 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2182
2183- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2184 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2185 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2186 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2187 and other systems.
2188
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002189- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2190 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2191 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2192 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 +00002193 work well with these.
2194
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002195- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2196
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002197- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002198 connections.
2199
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002200- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2201 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2202 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2203
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002204- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2205 sets
2206
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002207- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2208 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2209 name.
2210
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002211- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2212 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2213 passed in.
2214
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002215- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002216 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002217 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2218 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002219
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002220- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2221
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002222- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2223
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002224- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2225 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2226 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2227
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002228- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2229 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2230 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2231 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002232 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002233
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002234- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002235 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002236 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002237
2238- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2239 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2240 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2241
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002242- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002243 the value of its expression argument.
2244
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002245- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2246 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2247 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2248
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002249- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2250 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2251 skipstone browser was included.
2252
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002253- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2254 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2255
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002256Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002257-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002258
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002259- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2260 names in addition to accepting file names.
2261
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002262- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2263 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2264 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2265 still used and useful.)
2266
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002267- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2268 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2269 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2270 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002271
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002272- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2273 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2274 the generated binary.
2275
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002276Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002278
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002279- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2280
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002281- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2282 except in the hands of experts.
2283
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002284- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002285 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2286 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2287 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002288
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002289- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2290 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2291 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2292 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2293 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2294 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2295 builds.
2296
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002297- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2298 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2299 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2300 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2301 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2302 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2303 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2304 new type.
2305
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002306- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002307
2308 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2309 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2310 positive infinities.
2311
2312 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2313 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2314 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2315 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2316 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2317 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2318 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2319
2320 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2321
2322 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2323
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002324- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2325 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2326 size of the executable.
2327
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002328- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2329 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2330 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2331 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002332
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002333- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2334
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002335- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2336 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2337 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002338
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002339- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2340 well as Unix.
2341
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002342- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2343 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2344 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2345 modules in the README file for details.
2346
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002347C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002348-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002349
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002350- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2351 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002352 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002353 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002354 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002355
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002356- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2357 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2358 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2359 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2360 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2361 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002362 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002363 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2364 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2365 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2366 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2367 aligned.)
2368
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002369- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2370 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2371 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2372
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002373- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2374 level.
2375
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002376- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2377 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2378 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2379 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2380 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2381
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002382- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2383 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2384 code.
2385
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002386- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2387 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2388 adjusting for negative indices.
2389
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002390- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2391 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2392 object.
2393
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002394- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2395 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2396 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2397
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002398- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2399 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002400
2401- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2402
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002403- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2404 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2405 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2406 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2407
2408- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2409
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002410- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002411
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002412- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002413 without going through the buffer API.
2414
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002415- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002416
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002417- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2418 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2419 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2420 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2421
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002422- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2423 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2424
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002425- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002426 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2427
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002428New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002429-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002430
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002431- OpenVMS is now supported.
2432
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002433- AtheOS is now supported.
2434
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002435- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2436
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002437- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2438
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002439Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002440-----
2441
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002442- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2443 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2444 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002445
2446Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002447-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002448
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002449- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2450 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2451 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2452 bugs.
2453 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002454 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002455 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2456 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002457 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002458
2459- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002460 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002461
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002462- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2463 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2464
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002465- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2466 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002467 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002468 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2469
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002470- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2471 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2472 use files" uninstall option).
2473
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002474- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2475
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002476- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2477 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2478
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002479- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2480 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2481 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2482
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002483- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2484 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2485 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2486 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2487 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002488 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2489 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2490 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002491
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002492- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002493 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002494 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2495 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2496 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2497 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2498 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2499 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2500 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2501 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2502 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2503 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2504 work around.
2505
2506- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2507 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2508 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2509 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2510 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2511 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2512 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2513 specified with O_CREAT too).
2514
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002515Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002516----
2517
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002518- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002519
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002520- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2521 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2522 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2523
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002524- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2525 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2526 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2527
2528- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2529 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2530 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2531 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2532 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2533 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2534 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2535 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002536
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002537- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2538 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2539 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002540
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002541- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2542 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2543 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2544 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2545 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002546
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002547- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2548 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2549 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002550
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002551- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2552 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002553
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002554- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2555 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2556 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2557 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2558 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002559
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002560- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2561 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2562 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2563
2564- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2565 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2566 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002567
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002568- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2569 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2570 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2571 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002572 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002573
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002574- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2575 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002576
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002577- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2578 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002579
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002580- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002581 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002582 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2583 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002584
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002585
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002586What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002587===============================
2588
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002589*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2590
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002591Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002592--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002593
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002594- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2595 with a custom metaclass.
2596
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002597Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002598-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002599
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002600- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2601 are proxies.
2602
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002603Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002604-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002605
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002606- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2607 very short strings.
2608
2609- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2610 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2611 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2612 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2613 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2614
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002615Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002616-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002617
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002618- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2619 close or delete time).
2620
2621- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2622 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2623
2624- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2625
2626- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002627 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002628
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002629Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002630-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002631
2632Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002633-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002634
2635C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002636-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002637
2638New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002639-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002640
2641Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002642-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002643
2644Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002645-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002646
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002647- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2648
2649- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2650 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2651
2652- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2653 deleted at process exit time.
2654
2655- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2656 in backslash.
2657
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002658Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002659----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002660
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002661- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2662 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2663 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2664
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002665
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002666What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002667===========================
2668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002669*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2670
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002671Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002672--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002673
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002674- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2675 been extensively updated. See
2676
2677 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2678
2679 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2680
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002681- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2682 deleted!
2683
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002684- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2685 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2686 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2687 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2688 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2689
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002690- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2691
2692 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2693 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2694
2695 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2696 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2697 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2698 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2699 supported anyway.
2700
2701 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2702 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2703
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002704- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2705 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2706 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2707 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2708 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002709
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002710- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2711 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2712 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2713
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002714Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002715-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002716
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002717- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2718 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2719 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2720 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2721 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2722 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002723 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2724 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2725 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2726 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002727
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002728- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2729 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2730 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2731
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002732Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002733-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002734
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002735- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2736
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002737Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002738-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002739
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002740- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2741 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2742 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2743 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2744 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2745 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2746
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002747- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2748
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002749- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2750
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002751- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2752
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002753- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2754 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2755 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2756
2757- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2758
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002759Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002761
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002762- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2763 off a search on Google.
2764
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002765Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002766-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002767
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002768- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2769 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2770 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2771 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2772 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2773 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2774 other platforms should do likewise.
2775
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002776- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2777 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2778 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2779
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002780C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002782
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002783- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2784 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2785 producing key-value pairs.
2786
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002787- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002788 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002789 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2790 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2791 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2792 previously went unchallenged.
2793
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002794New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002795-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002796
2797Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002798-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002799
2800Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002801-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002802
2803Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002804----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002805
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002806- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2807 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002808
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002809- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2810 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2811 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2812 home.
2813
2814
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002815What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002816===========================
2817
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002818*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2819
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002820Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002821--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002822
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002823- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2824 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002825
2826 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002827 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002828
2829 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2830 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002831 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002832 This needs to be documented.
2833
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002834- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2835 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2836
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002837- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2838 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2839 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2840
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002841- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2842 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2843
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002844- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2845 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2846 class forbids it).
2847
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002848- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2849 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2850 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2851
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002852- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2853
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002854Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002855-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002856
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002857- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2858 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002859 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002860
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002861- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2862 (like 1 + '').
2863
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002864Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002865-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002866
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002867- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2868 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2869 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2870 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002871 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002872 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2873
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002874- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2875 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2876 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2877 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2878
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002879- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2880 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002881 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2882 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2883 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002884
2885- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2886 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002887
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002888- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2889 bytes on its input.
2890
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002891Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002892-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002893
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002894- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002895 convenience function.
2896
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002897- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2898 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2899 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002900 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2901 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2902 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2903 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2904 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2905 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002906
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002907- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2908 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2909 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2910 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2911
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002912- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2913 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2914 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2915
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002916- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2917 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2918 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2919 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2920
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002921- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2922 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002924 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2925 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2926 new -l and -e options.
2927
2928- statcache is now deprecated.
2929
2930- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2931 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002932 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002933 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2934 time properly taken into account.
2935
2936- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2937 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2938 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2939 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2940
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002941Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002943
2944Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002946
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002947- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2948 is built with libdb3 if available.
2949
2950- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2951
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002952C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002953-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002954
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002955- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2956 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2957 PySequence_Size().
2958
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002959- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2960
2961- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2962 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2963 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2964
2965- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2966 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2967
2968- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2969 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2970
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002971New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002973
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002974- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2975 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2976
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002977- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2978 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2979
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002980- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2981
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002982Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002983-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002984
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002985- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2986 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2987
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002988Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002989-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002990
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002991Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002993
2994- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2995 removed completely in the next release.
2996
2997- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2998 OSX.
2999
3000- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3001 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3002
3003- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3004
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003005
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003006What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003007===========================
3008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003009*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3010
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003011Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003012--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003013
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003014- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003015 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003016 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003017 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3018 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003019 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3020 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003021 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3022 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003023
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003024- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3025 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3026
3027- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3028 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3029
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003030Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003031-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003032
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003033- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3034 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3035 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3036 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3037 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3038 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3039 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3040 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3041
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003042- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3043 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3044 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3045 example).
3046
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003047- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003048 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003049 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003050 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003051
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003052- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3053 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3054 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003055 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003056
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003057- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3058 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3059 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3060 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3061 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3062 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3063
3064 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3065
3066 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3067
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003068Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003070
3071- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3072
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003073- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3074
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003075- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3076 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003077
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003078- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3079 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3080 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3081 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3082 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3083 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003084 attributes.
3085
3086- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3087 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3088 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003089
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003090- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3091 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3092 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003093
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003094- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3095 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3096 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003097 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3098 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3099
3100- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3101 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003102
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003103Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003105
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003106- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3107 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3108
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003109- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3110 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3111 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3112 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3113
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003114- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3115 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3116 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3117 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3118
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003119 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3120 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3121 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3122 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3123 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3124 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3125 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3126 without losing information).
3127
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003128- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003129 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3130 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3131 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3132 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3133 module).
3134
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003135 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003136 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3137 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3138 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3139 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003140
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003141- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003142 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3143 encoding.
3144
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003145- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3146 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3147
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003148- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003149 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3150
3151- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3152 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3153 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3154 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3155
3156- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3157
3158- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3159 ON, and OFF.
3160
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003161- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3162 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3163
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003164Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003166
3167- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3168 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3169 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003170
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003171- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3172 been added: -X and -E.
3173
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003174Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003175-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003176
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003177- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3178 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3179
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003180C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003182
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003183- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3184 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3185 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3186 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3187 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3188
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003189- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3190 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3191 as long) arguments.
3192
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003193- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3194 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3195 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3196 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3197 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3198 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3199
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003200- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3201 input.
3202
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003203New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003205
3206Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003207-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003208
3209Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003211
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003212- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3213 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3214 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3215
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003216- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3217 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3218 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003219 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003220
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003221 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3222 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3223 import signal
3224 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003225
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003227 while 1:
3228 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003230 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3231 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3232 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3233 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003234
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003235
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003236What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3237===========================
3238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3240
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003241Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003243
3244- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3245 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3246 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3247
3248- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3249 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3250 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3251 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3252 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3253 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3254 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003255
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003256- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003257 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003258 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3259 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3260 associate a docstring with a property.
3261
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003262- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3263 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3264 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3265 other built-in object types.
3266
3267- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3268 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3269 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3270 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3271 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3272
3273- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3274 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3275
3276- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3277 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003278 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003279 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3280 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3281 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3282 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3283 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3284
3285- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3286 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3287 class.
3288
3289- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3290 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3291 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3292 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3293
3294- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3295 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3296 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3297 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3298
3299- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3300 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3301
3302- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3303 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3304 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3305 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3306 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003307 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003308 with the same value as s.
3309
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003310- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3311
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003312Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003313----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003314
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003315- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3316
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003317- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3318 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3319 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3320 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3321 objects.
3322
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003323- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3324 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003325 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3326 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3327
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003328- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3329 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3330 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3331
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003332Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003334
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003335- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3336 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3337 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3338 by the instances.
3339
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003340- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3341 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3342 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3343
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003344- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3345 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3346 before the entire comparison is complete.
3347
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003348- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3349 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3350 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3351
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003352- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3353 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3354 getwriter().
3355
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003356- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3357 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3358
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003359- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003360 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3361 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3362
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003363- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3364 iterable object.
3365
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003366- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3367 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003368
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003369- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3370 authentication.
3371
3372- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3373 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003374
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003375- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003376 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3377 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3378 a sample driver.)
3379
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003380Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003381-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003382
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003383- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3384 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3385 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3386 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3387 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3388 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3389 kernel has large file support.
3390
3391- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3392 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3393 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3394 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3395 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3396
3397- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3398 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3399 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3400
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003401C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003403
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003404- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3405 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3406
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003407New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003408-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003409
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003410- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3411 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3412
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003413Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003415
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003416- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3417 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3418 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3419 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3420 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3421
3422- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3423 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3424 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3425 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3426
3427- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3428 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3429
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003430Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003431-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003432
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003433- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003434 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3435 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003436
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003437
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003438What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3439===========================
3440
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3442
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003443Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003445
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003446- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3447 big to represent as a C double.
3448
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003449- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3450 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3451 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3452 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3453 restriction).
3454
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003455- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3456 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3457 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3458 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3459 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3460
3461 >>> dir([])
3462 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3463 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3464 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3465 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3466 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3467 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3468 'reverse', 'sort']
3469
3470 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3471
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003472- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003473 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3474 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3475 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3476 OverflowError exception.
3477
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003478- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003479 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003480 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3481 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3482 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3483 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3484 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003485 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3487 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3488
3489 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3490 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3491 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3492 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003493
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003494- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003495 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3496 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3497 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3498 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3499 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3500 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3501 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3502 once it is created.
3503
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003504- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3505 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3506 (key, value) pairs.
3507
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003508- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003509 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3510 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3511
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003512- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3513 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3514 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3515 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3516 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003517
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003518- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003519 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3520 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3521
3522 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3523
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003524- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003525 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3526
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003527Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003529
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003530- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003531 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3532 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003533
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003534- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3535 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3536 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3537 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3538 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3539 in this area anymore).
3540
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003541- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3542 threading.Timer.
3543
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003544- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3545 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3546
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003547- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003548 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3549
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003550- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003551 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3552 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3553 converted to Python longs.
3554
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003555- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003556 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3557
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003558- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3559 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3560 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3561
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003562Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003564
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003565- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3566 division operators as per PEP 238.
3567
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003568Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003570
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003571- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3572 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3573 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3574 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3575
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003576C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003577-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003578
3579- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003580
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003581- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3582 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003583 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3586 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003587 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003590- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003591 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3592 module:
3593
3594 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003595
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003596 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3597 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003598
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003599 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3600 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003601
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003602 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3603
3604 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3605
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003606- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003607 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3608 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3609 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003610
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003611New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003612-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003613
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003614- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3615 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3616 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3617 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3618 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003619
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003620Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003622
3623Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003625
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003626- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3627 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3628 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3629 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003630 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3631 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3632 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3633 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3634 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003635
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003636- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003637 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3638
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003639
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003640What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3641===========================
3642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3644
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003645Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003647
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003648- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3649 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3650
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003651- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3652 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3653 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003654
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003655- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3656 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3657 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3658 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003659
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003660- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3661
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003663
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003664Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003666
3667- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003668 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003669 the module docstring for details.
3670
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003671Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003673
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003674- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003675 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3676 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3677 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003678
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003679- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3680 Nick Mathewson.
3681
3682Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003683----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003684
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003685- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3686 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3687 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3688 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3689 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3690 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3691 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3692 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3693
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003694- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3695 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3696 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3697 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3698
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003699- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3700 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3701 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3702 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3703 come a long way).
3704
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003705- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3706 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3707 write filters for these warnings).
3708
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003709- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3710 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3711 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3712 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3713 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3714
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003715- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3716 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3717 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3718 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3719 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3720 older distribution.
3721
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003722Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003724
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003725- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3726 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003727 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003728
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003729- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3730 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3731 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3732
3733- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3734
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003735- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3736
3737- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3738
3739- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3740
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003742
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003743- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3744
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003745New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003747
3748C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003750
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003751- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3752 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3753 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3754 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3755 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3756 against buffer overruns.
3757
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003758- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003759 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3760 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003761 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3762 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3763 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3764
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003765- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3766 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3767 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3768 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3769 deprecated.
3770
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003771Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003773
3774- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3775 relevant is found.
3776
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003777
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003778What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003779===========================
3780
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003781*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3782
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003783Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003785
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003786- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3787 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3788 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3789 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3790 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3791 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3792 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3793 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003794 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003795 repaired.
3796
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003797- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003798 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003799 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3800 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3801 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3802 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3803 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3804 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3805 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3806 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3807
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003808- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3809 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3810 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3811 leading BMO character).
3812
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003813- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3814 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3815 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3816
3817 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3818 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3819 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003820
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003821 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3822 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3823 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3824 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3825 for various simple to use conversions.
3826
3827 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3828 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3829
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003830 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3831 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3832 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3833 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3834 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3835 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3836 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3837 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3838 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3839 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3840 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3841 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3842 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3843 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3844 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003845
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003846- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3847 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3848 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003849 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003850 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003851
3852 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003853 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3854 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3855 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3856 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3857 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003858 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3859 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003860
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003861 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3862 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3863 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003864 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003865
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003866- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3867 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3868 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3869 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3870 floating arithmetic,
3871
3872 x = 9007199254740992.0
3873 print long(x)
3874
3875 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3876 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3877 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3878 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3879 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3880 functions are of good quality).
3881
3882 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3883 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3884 algorithms to break.
3885
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003886- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3887 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3888 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3889 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3890 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3891 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3892 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3893 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3894 order.
3895
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003896- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3897 operation along the most common code paths.
3898
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003899- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3900 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3901
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003902- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3903 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3904 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3905 {}.update(UserDict())
3906
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003907- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3908 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3909 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3910 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3911 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3912 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3913 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3914 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3915
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003916- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003917 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003919 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003920 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3921 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003922 join() method of strings
3923 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003924 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3925 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003927 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003928
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003929- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3930 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3931
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003932- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3933 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3934
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003935- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3936 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3937 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3938 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3939
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003940- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3941 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003942 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003943 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3944 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003945
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003946- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3947
3948
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003949Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003951
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003952- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003953 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003954 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3955 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3956
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003957- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3958 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3959
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003960- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3961 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3962 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3963 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3964
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003965- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3966 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3967 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3968
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003969- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3970
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003971- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3972
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003973- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3974 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3975 that are still imported into string.py).
3976
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003977- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3978
3979- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3980 Now it does.
3981
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003982- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3983
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003984- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3985 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3986 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3987 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3988 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003989 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3990 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003991
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003992- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3993 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3994 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3995 'help(object)'.
3996
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003997Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003999
4000- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004001 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004002 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4003 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4004
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004005- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004006 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4007 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004008
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004009C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004011
4012- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4013 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014
4015----
4016
4017**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**