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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
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Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00008=================================
9
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000010*XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
11
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000013--------------------------------------------
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +000014- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
15 integer range, so int("4"*1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
16 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000017
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +000018- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000019 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +000020 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000021
22- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
23 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
24 and deallocation.
25
26- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
27 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
28
29- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
30 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
31 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
32 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
33 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
34
35- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
36 now detected by the garbage collector.
37
38- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
39 [SF bug 519621]
40
41- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
42 identifier.
43
44- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
45 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
46 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
47 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
48 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
49 [SF bug 563060]
50
51- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
52 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
53 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
54 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
55 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
56
57- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
58 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
59 not called. [SF bug #537450]
60
61- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
62
63- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
64 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
65 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
66 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
67 state of the slots would be lost.)
68
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000069Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000070-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000071
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +000072- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
73 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
74 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
75 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
76 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
77 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
78 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
79 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
80 releases or implementations.
81
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000082- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +000083 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
84 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000085
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +000086- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
87 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
88
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +000089- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
90 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
91 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
92
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +000093- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
94 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
95
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +000096- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
97 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
98 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but not kept up
99 to date).
100
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000101- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
102 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
103 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
104 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
105 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
106
107 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
108 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
109 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
110 pattern.
111
112 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
113 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
114 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
115 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
116
117 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
118 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
119 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
120 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
121 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
122 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
123
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000124 - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
125 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
126 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables. In
127 addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
Neal Norwitz7165af22002-09-05 21:42:24 +0000128 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
129 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
130 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
131 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000132
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000133- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
134 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
135 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
136 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
137 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000138 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
139 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
140 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
141 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
142 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
143 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
144 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000145
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000146- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
147 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
148
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000149- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
150 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
151 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
152 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
153 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
154 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
155 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
156 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
157 to Zack Weinberg!
158
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000159- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
160 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
161 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
162 type. This has been fixed now.
163
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000164- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
165 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
166 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
167
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000168- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
169 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
170 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
171 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
172 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
173 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
174 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
175 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000176 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000177
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000178- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
179 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
180 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000181
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000182- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
183 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
184 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
185 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
186 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
187 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
188 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
189 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000190 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000191 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
192 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
193
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000194- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
195 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
196 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
197 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
198 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
199 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
200 this.)
201
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000202- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
203 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000204 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000205 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000206 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
207 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000208 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
209 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000210
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000211- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
212 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
213 currently running.
214
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000215- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
216 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
217 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
218 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
219
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000220- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
221 as directory names.
222
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000223- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
224 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
225
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000226- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
227 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
228
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000229- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000230 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
231 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000232
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000233- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
234 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
235 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
236 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
237 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
238
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000239- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
240 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
241 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
242 removed.
243
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000244- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
245 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
246 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
247
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000248- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
249 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
250 to __debug__.
251
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000252- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
253 string to the left with zeros. For example,
254 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
255
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000256- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
257 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
258 deprecated now.
259
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000260- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
261 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
262 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000263
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000264- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
265 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
266
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000267- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
268 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
269 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000270 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000271 is backward compatible.
272
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000273- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
274 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
275 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
276 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
277 could access a pointer to freed memory.
278
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000279- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
280 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
281 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
282 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
283 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
284 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000285
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000286- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
287 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
288
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000289- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
290 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
291
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000292- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
293 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
294 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
295 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
296 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
297
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000298- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
299 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
300 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
301
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000302- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000303 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
304
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000305Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000306-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000307
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000308- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkely DB library has been
309 added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is still
310 available in source code, but not built automatically anymore, and
311 is now named bsddb185.
312
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000313- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
314
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000315- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
316 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
317
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000318- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
319 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
320 supported.
321
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000322- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
323
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000324- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
325 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000326
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000327- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
328 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
329
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000330- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
331
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000332- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
333 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
334
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000335- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
336 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
337 functions but callable type objects.
338
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000339- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000340 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000341 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000342
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000343- posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been
344 added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000345
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000346- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
347 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000348
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000349- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
350 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
351 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
352 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
353
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000354- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
355 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000356
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000357- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
358 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
359 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
360 and __imul__.
361
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000362- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000363 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
364 is called.
365
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000366- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
367 been added where available.
368
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000369- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
370 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
371 interpreter was compiled.
372
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000373- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
374 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
375 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000376 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000377 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
378 1, not 2.
379
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000380- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
381 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
382 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
383 limit.
384
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000385- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
386 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
387 bug #623464.
388
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000389Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000390-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000391
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000392- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000393 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000394 Ward's Optik package.
395
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000396- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
397 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
398 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
399 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
400
401- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
402 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000403 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000404
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000405- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
406 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
407
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000408- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
409 modules are iterators now.
410
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000411- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
412 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
413 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
414 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
415 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
416 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000417
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000418- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
419 with their entity value.
420
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000421- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
422
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000423- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
424 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000425
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000426- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
427 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000428 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000429
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000430- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
431 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
432 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
433 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
434 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
435 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
436 main():
437
438 import locale
439 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
440
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000441- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
442 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
443
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000444- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
445 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
446 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
447 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
448 to the new standard.
449
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000450- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
451 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
452 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
453 an extension to the database.
454
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000455- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
456 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
457 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
458 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
459 is the base class of the two. (This is not documented yet, but
460 help(sets) gives a wealth of information.)
461
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000462- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
463
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000464- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000465 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000466
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000467- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
468 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
469 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
470 bounded integers.
471
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000472- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
473 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
474 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
475
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000476- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
477
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000478- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
479 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
480 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
481 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
482
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000483- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
484 argument.
485
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000486- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
487 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
488 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
489 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
490 [SF patch 560794].
491
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000492- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
493 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
494 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000495 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
496 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
497 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000498
499- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
500 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000501
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000502- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
503 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
504 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
505 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000506
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000507- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
508 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
509 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
510 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
511 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
512
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000513- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000514
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000515- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
516 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
517 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
518 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
519 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
520 identical to None.
521
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000522- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
523 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
524 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
525 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
526 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
527 results now.
528
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000529- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
530 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
531
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000532- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
533 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
534 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
535 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
536 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
537 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
538 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
539 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
540
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000541- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
542
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000543- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
544 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
545
546- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
547 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
548 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
549 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
550 and other systems.
551
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000552- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
553 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
554 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
555 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 +0000556 work well with these.
557
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000558- compileall now supports quiet operation.
559
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000560- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000561 connections.
562
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000563- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
564 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
565 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
566
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000567- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
568 sets
569
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000570- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
571 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
572 name.
573
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000574- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
575 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
576 passed in.
577
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000578- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000579 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000580 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
581 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000582
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000583- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
584
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000585- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
586
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000587- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
588 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
589 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
590
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000591- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
592 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
593 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
594 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
595 honored.
596
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000597- distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++
598 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
599 running under *nix.
600
601- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
602 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
603 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
604
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000605- New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints
606 the value of its expression argument.
607
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000608- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
609 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
610 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
611
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000612Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000613-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000614
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000615- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
616 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
617 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
618 still used and useful.)
619
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000620- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
621 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
622 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
623 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000624
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000625- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
626 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
627 the generated binary.
628
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000629Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000630-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000631
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000632- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
633
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000634- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
635 except in the hands of experts.
636
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000637- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000638 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
639 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
640 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000641
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000642- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
643 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
644 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
645 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
646 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
647 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
648 builds.
649
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000650- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
651 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
652 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
653 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
654 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
655 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
656 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
657 new type.
658
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000659- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000660
661 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
662 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
663 positive infinities.
664
665 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
666 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
667 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
668 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
669 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
670 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
671 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
672
673 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
674
675 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
676
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000677- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
678 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
679 size of the executable.
680
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000681- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
682 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
683 configure script. On other platforms, remove
684 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000685
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000686- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
687
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000688- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
689 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
690 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000691
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000692- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
693 well as Unix.
694
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000695- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
696 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
697 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
698 modules in the README file for details.
699
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000700C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000701-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000702
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000703- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
704 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000705 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000706 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000707 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000708
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000709- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
710 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
711 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
712 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
713 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
714 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
715 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
716 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
717 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
718 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
719 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
720 aligned.)
721
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000722- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
723 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
724 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
725
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000726- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
727 level.
728
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000729- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
730 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
731 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
732 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
733 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
734
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000735- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
736 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
737 code.
738
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000739- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
740 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
741 adjusting for negative indices.
742
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000743- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
744 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
745 object.
746
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000747- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
748 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
749 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
750
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000751- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
752 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000753
754- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
755
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000756- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
757 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
758 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
759 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
760
761- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
762
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000763- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000764
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000765- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000766 without going through the buffer API.
767
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000768- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000769
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000770- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
771 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
772 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
773 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
774
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000775- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
776 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
777
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000778- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000779 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
780
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000781New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000782-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000783
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000784- AtheOS is now supported.
785
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000786- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
787
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000788- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
789
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000790Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000791-----
792
793Yet to be written.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000794
795Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000796-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000797
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +0000798- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
799 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
800
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +0000801- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
802 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
803 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
804 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
805
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000806- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
807 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
808 use files" uninstall option).
809
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000810- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
811
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000812- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
813 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
814
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000815- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
816 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
817 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
818
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000819- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
820 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
821 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
822 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
823 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000824 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
825 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
826 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000827
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000828- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000829 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000830 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
831 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
832 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
833 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
834 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
835 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
836 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
837 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
838 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
839 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
840 work around.
841
842- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
843 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
844 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
845 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
846 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
847 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
848 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
849 specified with O_CREAT too).
850
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000851Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000852----
853
854Yet to be written.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000855
856
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000857What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000858===============================
859
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000860*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
861
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000862Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000863--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000864
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000865- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
866 with a custom metaclass.
867
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000868Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000869-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000870
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000871- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
872 are proxies.
873
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000874Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000875-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000876
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000877- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
878 very short strings.
879
880- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
881 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
882 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
883 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
884 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
885
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000886Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000887-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000888
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000889- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
890 close or delete time).
891
892- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
893 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
894
895- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
896
897- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000898 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000899
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000900Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000901-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000902
903Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000904-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000905
906C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000907-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000908
909New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000910-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000911
912Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000913-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000914
915Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000916-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000917
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000918- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
919
920- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
921 instances are deleted at process exit time.
922
923- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
924 deleted at process exit time.
925
926- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
927 in backslash.
928
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000929Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000930----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000931
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000932- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
933 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
934 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
935
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000936
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +0000937What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000938===========================
939
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000940*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
941
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000942Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000943--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000944
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000945- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
946 been extensively updated. See
947
948 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
949
950 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
951
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +0000952- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
953 deleted!
954
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +0000955- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
956 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
957 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
958 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
959 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
960
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000961- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
962
963 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
964 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
965
966 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
967 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
968 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
969 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
970 supported anyway.
971
972 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
973 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
974
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +0000975- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
976 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
977 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
978 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
979 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000980
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +0000981- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
982 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
983 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
984
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000985Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000986-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000987
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000988- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
989 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
990 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
991 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
992 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
993 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +0000994 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
995 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
996 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
997 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000998
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +0000999- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1000 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1001 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1002
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001003Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001004-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001005
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001006- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1007
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001008Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001009-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001010
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001011- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1012 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1013 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1014 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1015 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1016 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1017
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001018- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1019
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001020- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1021
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001022- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1023
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001024- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1025 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1026 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1027
1028- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1029
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001030Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001031-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001032
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001033- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1034 off a search on Google.
1035
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001036Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001037-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001038
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001039- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1040 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1041 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1042 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1043 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1044 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1045 other platforms should do likewise.
1046
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001047- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1048 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1049 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1050
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001051C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001052-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001053
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001054- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1055 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1056 producing key-value pairs.
1057
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001058- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001059 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001060 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1061 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1062 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1063 previously went unchallenged.
1064
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001065New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001066-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001067
1068Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001069-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001070
1071Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001072-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001073
1074Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001075----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001076
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001077- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1078 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001079
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001080- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1081 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1082 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1083 home.
1084
1085
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001086What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001087===========================
1088
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001089*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1090
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001091Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001092--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001093
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001094- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1095 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001096
1097 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001098 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001099
1100 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1101 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001102 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001103 This needs to be documented.
1104
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001105- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1106 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1107
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001108- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1109 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1110 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1111
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001112- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1113 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1114
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001115- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1116 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1117 class forbids it).
1118
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001119- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1120 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1121 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1122
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001123- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1124
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001125Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001126-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001127
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001128- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1129 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001130 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001131
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001132- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1133 (like 1 + '').
1134
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001135Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001136-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001137
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001138- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1139 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1140 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1141 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001142 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001143 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1144
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001145- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1146 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1147 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1148 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1149
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001150- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1151 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001152 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1153 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1154 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001155
1156- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1157 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001158
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001159- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1160 bytes on its input.
1161
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001162Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001163-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001164
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001165- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001166 convenience function.
1167
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001168- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1169 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1170 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001171 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1172 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1173 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1174 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1175 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1176 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001177
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001178- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1179 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1180 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1181 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1182
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001183- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1184 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1185 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1186
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001187- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1188 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1189 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1190 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1191
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001192- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1193 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001194 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001195 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1196 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1197 new -l and -e options.
1198
1199- statcache is now deprecated.
1200
1201- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1202 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001203 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001204 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1205 time properly taken into account.
1206
1207- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1208 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1209 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1210 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1211
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001212Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001213-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001214
1215Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001216-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001217
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001218- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1219 is built with libdb3 if available.
1220
1221- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1222
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001223C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001224-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001225
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001226- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1227 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1228 PySequence_Size().
1229
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001230- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1231
1232- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1233 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1234 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1235
1236- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1237 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1238
1239- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1240 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1241
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001242New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001243-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001244
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001245- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1246 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1247
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001248- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1249 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1250
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001251- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1252
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001253Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001254-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001255
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001256- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1257 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1258
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001259Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001260-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001261
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001262Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001263----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001264
1265- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1266 removed completely in the next release.
1267
1268- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1269 OSX.
1270
1271- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1272 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1273
1274- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1275
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001276
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001277What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001278===========================
1279
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001280*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1281
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001282Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001283--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001284
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001285- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001286 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001287 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001288 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1289 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001290 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1291 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001292 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1293 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001294
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001295- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1296 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1297
1298- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1299 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1300
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001301Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001302-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001303
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001304- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1305 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1306 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1307 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1308 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1309 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1310 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1311 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1312
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001313- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1314 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1315 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1316 example).
1317
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001318- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001319 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001320 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001321 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001322
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001323- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1324 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1325 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001326 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001327
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001328- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1329 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1330 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1331 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1332 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1333 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1334
1335 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1336
1337 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1338
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001339Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001340-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001341
1342- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1343
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001344- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1345
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001346- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1347 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001348
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001349- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1350 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1351 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1352 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1353 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1354 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001355 attributes.
1356
1357- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1358 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1359 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001360
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001361- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1362 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1363 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001364
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001365- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1366 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1367 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001368 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1369 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1370
1371- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1372 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001373
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001374Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001375-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001376
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001377- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1378 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1379
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001380- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1381 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1382 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1383 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1384
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001385- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1386 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1387 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1388 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1389
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001390 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1391 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1392 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1393 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1394 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1395 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1396 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1397 without losing information).
1398
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001399- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001400 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1401 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1402 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1403 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1404 module).
1405
1406 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1407 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1408 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1409 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1410 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001411
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001412- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001413 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1414 encoding.
1415
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001416- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1417 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1418
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001419- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001420 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1421
1422- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1423 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1424 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1425 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1426
1427- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1428
1429- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1430 ON, and OFF.
1431
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001432- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1433 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1434
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001435Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001436-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001437
1438- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1439 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1440 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001441
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001442- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1443 been added: -X and -E.
1444
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001445Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001446-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001447
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001448- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1449 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1450
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001451C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001452-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001453
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001454- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1455 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1456 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1457 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1458 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1459
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001460- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1461 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1462 as long) arguments.
1463
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001464- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1465 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1466 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1467 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1468 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1469 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1470
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001471- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1472 input.
1473
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001474New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001475-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001476
1477Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001478-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001479
1480Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001481-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001482
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001483- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1484 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1485 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1486
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001487- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1488 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1489 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001490 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001491
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001492 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1493 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1494 import signal
1495 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001496
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001497 try:
1498 while 1:
1499 pass
1500 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1501 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1502 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1503 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1504 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001505
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001506
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001507What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1508===========================
1509
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001510*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1511
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001512Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001513--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001514
1515- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1516 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1517 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1518
1519- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1520 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1521 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1522 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1523 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1524 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1525 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001526
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001527- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001528 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001529 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1530 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1531 associate a docstring with a property.
1532
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001533- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1534 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1535 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1536 other built-in object types.
1537
1538- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1539 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1540 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1541 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1542 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1543
1544- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1545 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1546
1547- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1548 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001549 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001550 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1551 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1552 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1553 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1554 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1555
1556- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1557 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1558 class.
1559
1560- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1561 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1562 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1563 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1564
1565- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1566 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1567 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1568 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1569
1570- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1571 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1572
1573- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1574 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1575 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1576 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1577 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001578 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001579 with the same value as s.
1580
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001581- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1582
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001583Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001584----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001585
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001586- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1587
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001588- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1589 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1590 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1591 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1592 objects.
1593
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001594- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1595 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001596 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1597 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1598
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001599- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1600 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1601 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1602
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001603Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001604-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001605
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001606- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1607 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1608 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1609 by the instances.
1610
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001611- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1612 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1613 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1614
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001615- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1616 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1617 before the entire comparison is complete.
1618
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001619- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1620 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1621 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1622
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001623- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1624 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1625 getwriter().
1626
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001627- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1628 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1629
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001630- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001631 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1632 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1633
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001634- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1635 iterable object.
1636
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001637- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1638 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001639
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001640- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1641 authentication.
1642
1643- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1644 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001645
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001646- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001647 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1648 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1649 a sample driver.)
1650
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001651Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001652-----
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001653
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001654Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001655-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001656
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001657- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1658 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1659 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1660 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1661 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1662 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1663 kernel has large file support.
1664
1665- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1666 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1667 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1668 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1669 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1670
1671- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1672 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1673 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1674
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001675C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001676-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001677
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001678- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1679 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1680
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001681New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001682-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001683
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001684- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1685 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1686
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001687Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001688-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001689
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001690- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1691 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1692 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1693 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1694 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1695
1696- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1697 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1698 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1699 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1700
1701- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1702 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1703
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001704Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001705-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001706
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001707- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001708 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1709 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001710
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001711
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001712What's New in Python 2.2a3?
1713===========================
1714
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001715*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
1716
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001717Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001718----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001719
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001720- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1721 big to represent as a C double.
1722
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001723- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1724 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1725 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1726 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1727 restriction).
1728
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001729- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1730 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1731 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1732 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1733 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1734
1735 >>> dir([])
1736 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1737 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1738 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1739 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1740 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1741 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1742 'reverse', 'sort']
1743
1744 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1745
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001746- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001747 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1748 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1749 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1750 OverflowError exception.
1751
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001752- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001753 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001754 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1755 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1756 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1757 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1758 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001759 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001760 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
1761 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
1762
1763 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1764 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1765 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1766 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001767
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001768- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001769 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1770 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1771 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1772 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1773 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1774 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1775 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1776 once it is created.
1777
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001778- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1779 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1780 (key, value) pairs.
1781
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001782- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001783 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1784 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1785
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001786- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1787 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1788 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1789 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1790 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001791
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001792- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001793 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1794 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1795
1796 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1797
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001798- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001799 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1800
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001801Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001802-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001803
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001804- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00001805 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
1806 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001807
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001808- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1809 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1810 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1811 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1812 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1813 in this area anymore).
1814
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001815- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1816 threading.Timer.
1817
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001818- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1819 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1820
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001821- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001822 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1823
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001824- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001825 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1826 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1827 converted to Python longs.
1828
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001829- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001830 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1831
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001832- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1833 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1834 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1835
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001836Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001837-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001838
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001839- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1840 division operators as per PEP 238.
1841
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001842Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001843-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001844
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001845- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1846 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1847 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
1848 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
1849
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001850C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001851-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001852
1853- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001854
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001855- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
1856 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001857 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001858
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001859 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
1860 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
1861 /* The conversion failed. */
1862 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001863
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001864- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001865 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
1866 module:
1867
1868 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001869
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001870 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
1871 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001872
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001873 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
1874 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001875
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001876 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
1877
1878 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
1879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001880- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001881 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
1882 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1883 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001884
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001885New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001886-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001887
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001888- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1889 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1890 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1891 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1892 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001893
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001894Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001895-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001896
1897Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001898-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001899
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001900- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1901 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1902 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1903 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001904 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1905 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1906 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1907 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1908 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001909
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001910- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001911 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1912
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001913
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001914What's New in Python 2.2a2?
1915===========================
1916
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001917*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
1918
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001919Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001920-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001921
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00001922- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
1923 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
1924
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001925- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
1926 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
1927 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001928
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00001929- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
1930 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
1931 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
1932 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001933
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001934- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
1935
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001936- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001937
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001938Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001939-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001940
1941- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00001942 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001943 the module docstring for details.
1944
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001945Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001946-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001947
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001948- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001949 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
1950 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
1951 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001952
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001953- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
1954 Nick Mathewson.
1955
1956Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001957----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001958
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001959- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
1960 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
1961 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
1962 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
1963 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
1964 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
1965 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
1966 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
1967
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00001968- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
1969 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
1970 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
1971 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
1972
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00001973- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
1974 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
1975 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
1976 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
1977 come a long way).
1978
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00001979- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
1980 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
1981 write filters for these warnings).
1982
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00001983- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
1984 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
1985 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
1986 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
1987 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
1988
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00001989- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
1990 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
1991 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
1992 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
1993 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
1994 older distribution.
1995
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001996Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001997-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001998
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001999- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2000 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002001 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002002
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002003- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2004 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2005 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2006
2007- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2008
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002009- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2010
2011- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2012
2013- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2014
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002015- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002016
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002017- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2018
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002019New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002020-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002021
2022C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002023-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002024
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002025- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2026 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2027 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2028 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2029 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2030 against buffer overruns.
2031
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002032- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002033 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2034 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002035 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2036 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2037 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2038
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002039- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2040 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2041 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2042 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2043 deprecated.
2044
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002045Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002046-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002047
2048- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2049 relevant is found.
2050
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002051
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002052What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002053===========================
2054
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002055*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2056
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002057Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002058----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002059
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002060- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2061 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2062 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2063 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2064 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2065 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2066 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2067 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002068 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002069 repaired.
2070
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002071- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002072 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002073 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2074 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2075 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2076 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2077 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2078 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2079 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2080 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2081
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002082- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2083 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2084 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2085 leading BMO character).
2086
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002087- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2088 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2089 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2090
2091 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2092 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2093 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002094
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002095 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2096 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2097 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2098 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2099 for various simple to use conversions.
2100
2101 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2102 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2103
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002104 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2105 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2106 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2107 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2108 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2109 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2110 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2111 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2112 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2113 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2114 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2115 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2116 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2117 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2118 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002119
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002120- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2121 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2122 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002123 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002124 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002125
2126 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002127 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2128 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2129 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2130 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2131 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002132 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2133 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002134
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002135 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2136 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2137 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002138 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002139
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002140- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2141 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2142 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2143 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2144 floating arithmetic,
2145
2146 x = 9007199254740992.0
2147 print long(x)
2148
2149 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2150 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2151 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2152 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2153 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2154 functions are of good quality).
2155
2156 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2157 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2158 algorithms to break.
2159
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002160- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2161 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2162 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2163 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2164 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2165 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2166 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2167 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2168 order.
2169
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002170- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2171 operation along the most common code paths.
2172
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002173- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2174 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2175
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002176- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2177 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2178 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2179 {}.update(UserDict())
2180
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002181- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2182 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2183 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2184 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2185 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2186 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2187 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2188 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2189
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002190- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002191 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002192
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002193 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002194 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2195 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002196 join() method of strings
2197 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002198 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2199 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002200 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002201 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002202
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002203- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2204 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2205
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002206- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2207 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2208
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002209- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2210 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2211 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2212 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2213
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002214- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2215 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002216 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002217 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2218 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002219
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002220- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2221
2222
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002223Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002224-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002225
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002226- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002227 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002228 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2229 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2230
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002231- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2232 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2233
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002234- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2235 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2236 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2237 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2238
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002239- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2240 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2241 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2242
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002243- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2244
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002245- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2246
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002247- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2248 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2249 that are still imported into string.py).
2250
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002251- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2252
2253- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2254 Now it does.
2255
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002256- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2257
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002258- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2259 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2260 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2261 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2262 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002263 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2264 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002265
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002266- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2267 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2268 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2269 'help(object)'.
2270
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002271Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002272-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002273
2274- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002275 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002276 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2277 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2278
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002279- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002280 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2281 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002282
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002283C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002284-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002285
2286- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2287 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002288
2289----
2290
2291**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**