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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000015- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
16 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
17
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000018- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
19 constant.
20
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000021- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
22 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
23 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
24 large), and to anomalies such as
25 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
26 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
27 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
28 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000029
30Extension modules
31-----------------
32
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +000033- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
34 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000035 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
36 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
37 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000038
39Library
40-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000041
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +000042- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
43 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
44 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
45 Closes bug #1039270.
46
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000047- Updates for the email package:
48 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
49 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
50 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
51 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
52 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
53 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
54 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
55 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
56 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
57 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
58 + Updates to documentation.
59
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000060- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
61 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
62 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
63 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
64
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000065- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000066
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000067- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
68 applications should use the getmember function.
69
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000070- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
71
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000072- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
73 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
74 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
75 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
76 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
77 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
78 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
79 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
80 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
81
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000082- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
83 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000084 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000085
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000086- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
87 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
88 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
89 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
90 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
91 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
92 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
93 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000094
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +000095- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
96 the new public features (of which there are many).
97
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000098- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000099 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
100 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
101 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
102 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000103 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000104
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000105- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
106
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000107- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
108 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
109 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
110 options.
111
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000112- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
113 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
114 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
115 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
116 conditions under which non-string values work.
117
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000118Build
119-----
120
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000121- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
122 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
123 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
124
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000125- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
126 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
127 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
128 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
129 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000130
131C API
132-----
133
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000134- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
135
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000136- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
137 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
138 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000139
140Documentation
141-------------
142
143...
144
145Tests
146-----
147
148- test__locale ported to unittest
149
150Windows
151-------
152
153...
154
155Mac
156---
157
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000158- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
159 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
160 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000161
162New platforms
163-------------
164
165...
166
167Tools/Demos
168-----------
169
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000170- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
171 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
172 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
173 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
174 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000175
176
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000177What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
178=================================
179
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000180*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000181
182Core and builtins
183-----------------
184
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000185- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000186 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
187
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000188- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
189 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
190 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
191 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
192 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
193 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
194 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
195 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000196 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
197 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
198 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
199 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
200 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000201
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000202- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
203 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
204 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
205 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
206 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
207
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000208- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
209
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000210- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
211 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
212
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000213- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
214 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
215 modified the list.
216
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000217- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
218 functions is now writable.
219
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000220- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
221 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
222 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
223 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
224
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000225- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
226 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
227 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
228 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
229 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000230
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000231- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
232 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
233
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000234Extension modules
235-----------------
236
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000237- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
238
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000239- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
240 data.
241
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000242- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
243 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
244 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
245 supposed to have been truncated away.
246
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000247- Added socket.socketpair().
248
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000249- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
250 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
251
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000252- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000253 versions of Python, have now been removed.
254
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000255Library
256-------
257
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000258- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000259 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000260
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000261- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
262 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
263
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000264- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
265 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
266
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000267- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
268
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000269- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
270 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000271
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000272- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
273 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
274
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000275- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
276
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000277- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
278
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000279- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
280
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000281- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
282 Percivall.
283
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000284- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
285 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
286
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000287- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
288 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
289 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000290 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000291
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000292- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
293 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
294 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
295 and exponent.
296
297- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
298
299- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
300 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
301 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
302
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000303- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
304 to the readline module.
305
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000306- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000307 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
308 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000309
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000310- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
311 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
312 contains symlinks.
313
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000314- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
315 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
316
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000317- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
318 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
319 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
320
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000321- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
322 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
323 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
324 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
325 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
326 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
327 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
328 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
329 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
330 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
331 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
332 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
333 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
334
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000335- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
336
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000337Tools/Demos
338-----------
339
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000340- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
341 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
342
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000343- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
344
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000345Build
346-----
347
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000348- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
349 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
350 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
351 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
352 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
353 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
354 plans to do so.
355
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000356- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
357 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
358
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000359- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
360 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
361
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000362- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
363 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
364
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000365- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
366 GNU/k*BSD systems.
367
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000368- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
369 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
370
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000371C API
372-----
373
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000374..
375
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000376Documentation
377-------------
378
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000379- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
380 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
381
382- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
383 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
384 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000385
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000386New platforms
387-------------
388
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000389- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
390
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000391Tests
392-----
393
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000394..
395
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000396Windows
397-------
398
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000399- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
400 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
401 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
402 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
403 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
404 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
405 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
406 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
407 the problem.
408
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000409Mac
410---
411
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000412..
413
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000414
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000415What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
416=================================
417
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000418*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000419
420Core and builtins
421-----------------
422
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000423- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
424 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
425 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
426 sensitive code.
427
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000428- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000429 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000430
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000431 @staticmethod
432 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000433
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000434 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000435
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000436- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
437 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
438 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
439 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
440 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
441 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
442 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
443 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
444 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
445 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
446 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
447
448 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
449 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
450 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
451 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
452 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
453 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
454 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
455
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000456- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
457 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
458
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000459- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000460 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000461
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000462- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000463 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000464 which was missing for no apparent reason.
465
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000466- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000467 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
468 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
469
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000470- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
471 types that support garbage collection.
472
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000473- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
474
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000475- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
476 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
477 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
478 Jython.
479
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000480- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
481
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000482- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
483 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
484
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000485- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
486 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
487 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000488
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000489- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
490 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
491 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
492
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000493Extension modules
494-----------------
495
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000496- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
497
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000498Library
499-------
500
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000501- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
502 TIS-620
503
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000504- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
505 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
506 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
507 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
508 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
509 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
510 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
511 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
512 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
513 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
514
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000515- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
516
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000517- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
518 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
519 same as when the argument is omitted).
520 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
521
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000522- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
523
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000524- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
525 schemes are offered.
526
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000527- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
528
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000529- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
530 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
531 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
532
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000533- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
534
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000535- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
536 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
537
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000538- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
539 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
540 when dummy_threading is being used.
541
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000542- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
543 from a tarfile.
544
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000545- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000546 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000547
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000548- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
549 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
550 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
551 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
552
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000553- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
554 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
555
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000556- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
557 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
558 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
559 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
560 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
561 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
562 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
563 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
564 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
565 by some other method in progress).
566
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000567- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
568 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
569 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000570
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000571- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
572
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000573- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
574 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
575 AM Kuchling.
576
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000577- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
578 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
579 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
580
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000581- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
582 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
583 instead of unsigned.
584
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000585- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000586 no longer part of the public API.
587
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000588- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
589 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
590 string methods of the same name).
591
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000592- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000593 SF patch 945642.
594
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000595- doctest unittest integration improvements:
596
597 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
598
599 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
600 DocTestSuites.
601
602- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
603 that provide thread-local data.
604
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000605- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
606 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
607
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000608- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
609
610- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
611 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
612 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
613
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000614- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
615
616 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
617 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
618 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000619
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000620 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
621 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
622 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
623 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
624
625 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
626 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
627
628 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
629 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
630 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
631 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
632
633 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
634 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
635 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
636 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
637 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
638
639 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
640 wrapping help output.
641
642 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
643 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
644 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000645
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000646C API
647-----
648
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000649- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
650 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
651 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
652 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
653 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
654 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
655 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
656 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
657 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
658 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
659 its visible semantics have not changed.
660
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000661- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
662 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
663
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000664Documentation
665-------------
666
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000667- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000668
669 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000670 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000671
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000672 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000673
674 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
675
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000676- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000677
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000678Tests
679-----
680
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000681- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000682 platforms that use the Makefile.
683
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000684- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
685 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
686 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
687
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000688
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000689What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
690=================================
691
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000692*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000693
694Core and builtins
695-----------------
696
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000697- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
698 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
699 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
700 objects now (one object instead of three).
701
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000702- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
703 Windows DLLs.
704
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000705- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
706 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000707
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000708- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
709 a new .pyc magic.
710
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000711- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
712 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
713 be there.
714
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000715- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
716 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
717 the LC_NUMERIC category.
718
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000719- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
720 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
721 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
722
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000723- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
724
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000725- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
726 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
727 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000728
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000729- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
730 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
731
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000732- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
733
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000734- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000735 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000736
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000737- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
738
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000739- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
740
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000741- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
742 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
743
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000744- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
745 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
746 Fixes bug #858016 .
747
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000748- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
749 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
750 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
751
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000752- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
753 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
754 improves their performance (about 35%).
755
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000756- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
757 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
758 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
759
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000760- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
761 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
762 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
763 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
764
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000765- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
766 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
767 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
768 length is not known).
769
770- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
771 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000772 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
773 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000774 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
775
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000776- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
777 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
778
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000779- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
780 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
781 keyword arguments.
782
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000783- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
784 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
785 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
786
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000787- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
788 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
789 cases.
790
791- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
792 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
793 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
794 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
795 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
796 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
797 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
798 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
799 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
800 a release build.
801
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000802- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
803 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
804
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000805- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000806 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000807
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000808- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
809 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
810 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
811 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
812 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
813 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
814 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
815 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
816 destroyed.
817
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000818- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
819 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
820 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
821 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
822 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
823 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
824 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
825 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
826
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000827- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
828 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
829 character other than a space.
830
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000831- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
832 by the function object or by the method object, the function
833 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
834 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
835 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
836 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
837 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
838 attributes with the same name.
839
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000840- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
841 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
842 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
843 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
844 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
845 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
846 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
847 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
848 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
849 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
850 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
851 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
852 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
853 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000854
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000855- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
856 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
857 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
858 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
859 This has been repaired.
860
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000861- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
862
863- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
864
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000865- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
866 over a sequence.
867
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000868- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000869 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000870
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000871- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
872
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000873- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
874 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
875 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
876 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
877 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
878 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
879 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
880 records with equal keys is unchanged).
881
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000882- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
883 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
884 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
885
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000886- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
887 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
888 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
889 freelist.
890
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000891- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
892 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
893
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000894- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
895 number.
896
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000897- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
898 a TypeError exception.
899
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000900- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
901 820195.
902
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000903- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
904 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
905 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
906
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000907- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000908 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
909 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000910
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000911- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
912 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
913 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
914
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000915- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
916 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000917 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000918
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000919- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000920 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
921 the first call.
922
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000923
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000924Extension modules
925-----------------
926
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000927- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
928 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
929
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000930- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
931 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
932 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
933 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
934 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
935 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
936 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000937
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000938- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
939
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000940- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
941
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000942- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
943 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
944
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000945- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
946 fewer false positives.
947
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000948- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
949 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
950
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000951- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000952 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
953
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000954- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000955 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000956 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000957 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
958 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000959
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000960- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
961 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
962 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
963 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
964
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000965- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
966 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
967 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
968 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
969 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
970 #897625.
971
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000972- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
973 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
974
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000975- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
976 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
977 and pops on either side of the deque.
978
979- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
980 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
981
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000982- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
983 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
984 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
985 other functions that expect a function argument.
986
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000987- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
988
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000989- os.getsid was added.
990
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000991- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
992 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
993 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
994
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000995- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
996
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000997- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
998
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000999- readline.clear_history was added.
1000
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001001- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1002
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001003- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1004
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001005- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1006
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001007- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1008
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001009- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1010
1011- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1012
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001013- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1014
1015- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1016
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001017- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1018 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1019 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1020
1021- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1022 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1023 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1024 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1025 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1026 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1027 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1028
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001029- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1030 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1031 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1032 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001033
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001034- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001035 iterators from a single iterable.
1036
1037- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1038 of raising a TypeError exception.
1039
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001040- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1041 as parameter.
1042
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001043Library
1044-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001045
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001046- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1047 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1048 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001049
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001050- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1051 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1052 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001053
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001054- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001055
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001056- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1057 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001058
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001059- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1060 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1061
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001062- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1063
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001064- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001065 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001066
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001067- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001068 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001069
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001070- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1071
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001072- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1073 on cygwin and mingw32.
1074
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001075- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1076
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001077- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1078 module.
1079
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001080- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1081 installation scheme for all platforms.
1082
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001083- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001084 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001085
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001086- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1087 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1088 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1089
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001090- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1091 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1092 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1093
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001094- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1095
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001096- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1097
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001098- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1099 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1100
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001101- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1102 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1103 type pattern with the same value exists.
1104
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001105- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1106 when run from the command prompt).
1107
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001108- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1109 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1110
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001111- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1112 default sort).
1113
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001114- Added global runctx function to profile module
1115
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001116- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1117
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001118- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1119
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001120- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1121
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001122- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001123 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1124 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1125 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1126 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1127 accordingly.
1128
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001129- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1130 decoding standards.
1131
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001132- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1133 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1134 called for all requests.
1135
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001136- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1137 they are passed to the compiler.
1138
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001139- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1140 indent, width and depth.
1141
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001142- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1143 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1144
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001145- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1146 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1147
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001148- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1149
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001150- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1151
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001152- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1153
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001154- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1155 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1156
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001157- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001158 for better performance.
1159
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001160- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001161
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001162- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1163 a string).
1164
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001165- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1166
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001167- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1168
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001169- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1170
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001171- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1172
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001173- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1174 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1175 list of fieldnames.
1176
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001177- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1178 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1179
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001180- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1181
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001182- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1183 empty lists.
1184
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001185- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1186 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1187 and shelves.
1188
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001189- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1190 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1191
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001192- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001193 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1194 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001195
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001196- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1197 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001198 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001199
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001200- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001201 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1202 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1203
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001204- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1205 and removed in Py2.4.
1206
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001207- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1208
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001209- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1210
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001211Tools/Demos
1212-----------
1213
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001214- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1215 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1216
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001217- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1218
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001219- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1220 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1221 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1222 destination in situations where both files are given.
1223
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001224- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1225 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1226 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1227 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1228
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001229- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1230
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001231- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1232 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1233 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1234 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1235 now.
1236
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001237- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1238 in effect
1239
1240- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1241 C-c C-h
1242
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001243- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1244 -d option was given.
1245
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001246Build
1247-----
1248
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001249- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1250 build under OS X.
1251
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001252- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1253 --enable-profiling.
1254
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001255- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1256 is configured --with-tsc.
1257
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001258- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1259 on AMD64.
1260
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001261- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1262 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1263
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001264- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1265 removed.
1266
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001267- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1268 supported (see PEP 11).
1269
1270- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1271
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001272- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1273
1274- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1275 (see PEP 11).
1276
1277- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1278 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1279
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001280C API
1281-----
1282
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001283- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1284 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1285 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1286
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001287- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1288 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1289 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1290 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1291
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001292- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1293 generator objects.
1294
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001295- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1296 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001297 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1298 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001299
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001300- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1301 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1302
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001303- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1304 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1305 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1306 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1307 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1308
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001309- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1310 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1311 about 10% faster.
1312
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001313- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1314 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1315
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001316- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1317 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1318 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1319 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1320
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001321Windows
1322-------
1323
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001324- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1325 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1326 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1327 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1328
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001329- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1330 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1331 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1332
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001333
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001334What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1335===============================
1336
1337*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1338
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001339IDLE
1340----
1341
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001342- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1343 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1344 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1345 context-menu actions.
1346
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001347- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1348 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1349 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1350 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1351 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1352 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1353 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1354 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1355 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1356
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001357
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001358What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1359=============================================
1360
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001361*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001362
1363Core and builtins
1364-----------------
1365
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001366- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001367 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001368 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1369
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001370Extension modules
1371-----------------
1372
1373- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1374 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1375 than once. This has been fixed.
1376
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001377- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1378 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1379 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1380 call.
1381
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001382- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1383
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001384Library
1385-------
1386
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001387- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1388 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1389
1390- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1391 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1392 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1393 restored.
1394
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001395IDLE
1396----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001397
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001398- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001399
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001400Build
1401-----
1402
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001403- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1404 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1405
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001406C API
1407-----
1408
1409Windows
1410-------
1411
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001412- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1413 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1414
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001415- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1416
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001417Mac
1418---
1419
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001420- Various fixes to pimp.
1421
1422- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1423
1424- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1425 more problems than it solves.
1426
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001427
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001428What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1429=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001430
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001431*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1432
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001433Core and builtins
1434-----------------
1435
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001436- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1437 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1438
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001439- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1440 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001441 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001442
1443- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1444 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1445 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001446 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001447
1448- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1449 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001450
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001451- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1452 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1453 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1454
1455- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001456 770247.
1457
1458- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001459
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001460Extension modules
1461-----------------
1462
1463- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1464 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1465
1466- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1467
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001468- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1469
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001470- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1471 contained within the _strptime module.
1472
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001473- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1474 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1475
1476- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001477 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1478
1479- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1480 the find_class attribute, if present.
1481
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001482- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001483
1484 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1485 (SF bug 763298).
1486
1487 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001488 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1489 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1490 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001491
1492 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1493
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001494Library
1495-------
1496
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001497- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1498
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001499- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1500 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1501 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1502 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1503 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1504 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1505 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1506 or Tester().
1507
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001508- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1509 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1510 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1511 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1512 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1513 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1514 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1515 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1516 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001517
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001518 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001519
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001520- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1521 weren't before was an oversight.
1522
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001523- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1524 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1525
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001526- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1527 when there are no lines.
1528
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001529- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1530 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1531
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001532- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1533 to child processes.
1534
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001535- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1536
1537- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1538
1539- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1540 xmlrpclib.
1541
1542- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1543 responses.
1544
1545- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1546 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1547
1548- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1549 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1550 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1551
1552- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1553 used as patterns.
1554
1555- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1556 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1557 than Tk 8.3.
1558
1559- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1560
1561- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001562
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001563Tools/Demos
1564-----------
1565
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001566- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1567
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001568- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1569
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001570- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001571
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001572Build
1573-----
1574
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001575- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1576
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001577- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1578
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001579- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1580 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001581
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001582- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1583 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1584 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001585
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001586C API
1587-----
1588
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001589- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1590 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1591
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001592Windows
1593-------
1594
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001595- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1596 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1597 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1598 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1599 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1600 Python exception ::
1601
1602 thread.error: can't start new thread
1603
1604 is raised now.
1605
1606- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1607 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1608 instead of from DLL teardown.
1609
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001610Mac
1611---
1612
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001613- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001614 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001615 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1616 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1617 the executable in the bundle.
1618
1619- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001620
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001621- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1622
1623- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1624 on Panther.
1625
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001626What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1627================================
1628
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001629*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001630
1631Core and builtins
1632-----------------
1633
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001634- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1635 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1636 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1637 with the -i option.
1638
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001639- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1640 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1641
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001642- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1643 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1644
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001645- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1646 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1647 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1648 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1649 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1650 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1651 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1652 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1653 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1654 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1655 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1656 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1657 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001658
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001659- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1660 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1661 embedded in a lambda expression.
1662
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001663- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1664 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1665 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1666 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1667 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1668
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001669- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1670 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1671 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1672
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001673- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1674 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1675
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001676- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1677 It's writable again.
1678
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001679- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1680 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1681 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001682 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001683
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001684- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1685 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1686 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1687
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001688Extension modules
1689-----------------
1690
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001691- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1692 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1693
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001694- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1695 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1696 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1697 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1698
1699- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1700 collection.
1701
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001702- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1703 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1704 unique within a single program run.
1705
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001706- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1707 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1708
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001709- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1710 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1711
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001712- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1713 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001714
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001715- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1716
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001717- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1718 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1719
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001720- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1721 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1722 for many BSD-derived systems.
1723
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001724
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001725Library
1726-------
1727
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001728- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1729 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1730 primary ones:
1731
1732 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1733 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1734 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1735
1736 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1737 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1738 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1739 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1740 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1741 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1742
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001743- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1744 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1745 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1746 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1747 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1748 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1749 argument.
1750
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001751- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1752 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1753 in the archive.
1754
1755- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1756 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1757
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001758- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1759 569574).
1760
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001761- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1762 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1763 no more.
1764
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001765- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1766 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1767 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1768 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1769 code coverage.
1770
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001771- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1772 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1773 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001774 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1775 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001776
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001777- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1778 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1779 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001780 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001781
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001782- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1783
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001784- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1785 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1786 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1787 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1788
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001789- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1790 handling.
1791
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001792- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1793 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1794
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001795- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1796 in socket.py.
1797
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001798- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1799
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001800- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1801 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1802 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1803 opener with proxy support.
1804
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001805- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1806
1807- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1808
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001809Tools/Demos
1810-----------
1811
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001812- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1813
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001814- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1815
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001816- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1817 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001818
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001819- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1820 files.
1821
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001822Build
1823-----
1824
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001825- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001826 different root directory.
1827
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001828C API
1829-----
1830
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001831- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1832 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1833 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1834 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1835 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1836 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1837 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1838 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1839 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1840 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1841
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001842- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1843 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1844 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1845 from Python.
1846
1847
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001848New platforms
1849-------------
1850
1851None this time.
1852
1853Tests
1854-----
1855
1856- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1857 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1858
1859Windows
1860-------
1861
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001862- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1863
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001864- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1865 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1866 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1867 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1868 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1869 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1870 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1871 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1872 that's what it's for.
1873
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001874Mac
1875---
1876
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001877- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1878 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1879 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1880 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001881- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1882 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1883- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001884
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001885SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1886------------------------------------
1887
1888430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1889598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1890622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1891661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1892683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1893697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1894713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1895724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1896727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1897729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1898730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1899731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1900732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1901733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1902735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1903740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1904744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1905745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1906747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1907749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1908751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1909753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1910755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1911757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1912760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1913
1914
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001915What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1916================================
1917
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001918*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001919
1920Core and builtins
1921-----------------
1922
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001923- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1924 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1925
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001926- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1927 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1928 and cannot be strings).
1929
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001930- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1931 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1932 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1933 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1934
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001935- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1936 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1937 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1938 Python itself.
1939
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001940- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1941 the referenced object, if it has one.
1942
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001943- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1944 the thread started at
1945 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1946
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001947- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1948 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1949 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1950 placed on a list index.
1951
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001952- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1953 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1954 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1955 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1956
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001957- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1958 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1959 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1960 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1961 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1962 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1963 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1964
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001965- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1966 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1967 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1968 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1969 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1970
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001971- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1972 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001973
1974- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1975 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1976 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1977 #693195.)
1978
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001979- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1980 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001981
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001982- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001983 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001984 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1985 interpreter executions, would fail.
1986
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001987- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001988 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001989 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001990
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001991Extension modules
1992-----------------
1993
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001994- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1995 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1996 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1997 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1998
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001999- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2000 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2001
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002002- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2003 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2004 and Greg Chapman.)
2005
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002006- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2007 recursively.
2008
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002009- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002010 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2011 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2012 leaks.
2013
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002014- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2015
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002016- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2017 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2018 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2019 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2020 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2021 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2022 #705836.
2023
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002024- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002025 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2026
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002027- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2028 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2029 See SF bug #692416.
2030
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002031- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2032 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2033
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002034- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2035 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2036 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002037
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002038- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002039 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2040 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2041
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002042- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2043 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2044 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2045 timeouts to work properly.
2046
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002047Library
2048-------
2049
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002050- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2051 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2052 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2053 future release.
2054
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002055- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2056 for querying platform dependent features.
2057
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002058- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002059
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002060- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2061 pickle protocol versions.
2062
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002063- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2064 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2065 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2066
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002067- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2068
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002069- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2070 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2071 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2072 modules.
2073
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002074- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2075 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2076 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2077
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002078- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2079 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2080
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002081- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2082 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2083 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2084
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002085- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002086 MS Office extensions.
2087
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002088- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2089 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2090
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002091- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2092 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2093
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002094- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2095 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2096 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2097 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2098 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2099 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2100
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002101- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2102 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2103 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002104
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002105- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2106 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2107 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2108
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002109- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2110
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002111- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2112 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2113 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2114
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002115Tools/Demos
2116-----------
2117
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002118- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2119 See the module docstring for details.
2120
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002121Build
2122-----
2123
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002124- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2125 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002126
2127C API
2128-----
2129
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002130- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2131
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002132- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2133 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2134 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2135
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002136- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2137 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002138
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002139 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2140 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2141 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002142
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002143- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002144 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2145
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002146- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2147 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2148 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002149
2150New platforms
2151-------------
2152
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002153None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002154
2155Tests
2156-----
2157
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002158- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2159 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002160
2161Windows
2162-------
2163
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002164- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2165 function.
2166
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002167- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2168 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002169
2170Mac
2171---
2172
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002173- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2174 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002175
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002176- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2177 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002178
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002179- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2180 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2181 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002182
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002183- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002184 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2185 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002186
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002187- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2188 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002189
2190
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002191What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2192=================================
2193
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002194*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002195
2196Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002197-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002198
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002199- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2200 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2201 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2202
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002203- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2204 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2205 (SF patch #664376.)
2206
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002207- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2208 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2209 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2210 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2211 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2212 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002213 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002214
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002215- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2216 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2217 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2218 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002219 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002220
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002221- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2222 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2223 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2224 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2225 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2226 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2227 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2228 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2229 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2230 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2231 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2232
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002233- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2234 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2235 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2236 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2237 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2238 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2239
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002240- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2241 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2242
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002243- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2244 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2245 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2246 case.)
2247
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002248- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2249 passed as unicode strings.
2250
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002251- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2252 See SF bug #683467.
2253
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002254- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2255 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2256
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002257- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2258
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002259- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2260
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002261- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2262 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2263 arguments.
2264
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002265- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2266 See SF bug #667147.
2267
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002268- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002269 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002270 See SF bug #676155.
2271
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002272- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002273 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002274 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2275 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2276 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2277 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2278 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2279 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002280
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002281Extension modules
2282-----------------
2283
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002284- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2285 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2286 tp_as_number pointer.
2287
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002288- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2289 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2290 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2291 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2292 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2293
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002294- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2295
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002296- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2297
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002298- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002299 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002300 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2301 patch #678531.)
2302
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002303- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2304 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2305
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002306- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2307 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2308
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002309- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2310
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002311- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2312 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2313 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2314
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002315- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2316
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002317- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2318 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2319
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002320- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002321
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002322- datetime changes:
2323
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002324 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2325
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002326 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2327 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2328 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2329 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2330 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2331 now.
2332
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002333 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002334 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2335 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002336
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002337 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002338 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002339 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2340 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2341 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2342 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002343
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002344 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2345 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2346 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002347 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2348
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002349 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2350 by a later example coded by Guido.
2351
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002352 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002353 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2354 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2355 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002356 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2357 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2358
2359 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2360 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2361 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2362 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2363 tzinfo subclass instance.
2364
2365 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2366 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2367 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2368 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2369 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2370 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2371 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2372 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002373
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002374 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2375 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2376 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2377 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2378 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002379 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2380
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002381 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002382
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002383 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2384 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2385 as a naive datetime object.
2386
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002387 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2388 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2389 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2390
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002391 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2392 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2393 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2394 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2395 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2396 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2397 comparison.
2398
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002399 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2400 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2401 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2402 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002403 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002404
2405 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002406
2407 and ::
2408
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002409 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2410
2411 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2412 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2413 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2414 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2415
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002416 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2417 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2418 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2419 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2420 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2421
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002422 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2423 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002424 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2425 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002426
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002427Library
2428-------
2429
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002430- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2431 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2432
2433- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2434 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2435 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2436 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2437 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2438 See PEP 307 for details.
2439
2440- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2441 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2442
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002443- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2444 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002445 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002446 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2447 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002448 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002449
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002450- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2451 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2452
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002453- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2454 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2455 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2456
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002457- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2458
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002459- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2460 exception.
2461
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002462- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2463 class.
2464
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002465- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2466 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2467 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2468
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002469- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2470 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2471
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002472- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002473 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2474 See SF bug #659228.
2475
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002476- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2477 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2478 See SF patch #651082.
2479
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002480- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002481
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002482- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2483 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2484
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002485- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002486 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002487
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002488- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2489 DOS paths from other platforms.
2490
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002491Tools/Demos
2492-----------
2493
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002494- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2495 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2496 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2497 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2498 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2499 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2500 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2501 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2502 example:
2503
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002504 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2505 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002506
2507 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2508
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002509
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002510Build
2511-----
2512
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002513- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2514 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2515 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002516 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2517
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002518 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2519
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002520- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2521 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2522 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2523 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2524 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2525 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2526 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2527 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2528 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2529
2530- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2531 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2532 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2533 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2534
2535- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2536 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2537
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002538C API
2539-----
2540
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002541- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2542 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002543
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002544- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2545 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2546 tp_as_number pointer.
2547
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002548- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2549 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2550 (SF #681367)
2551
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002552- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2553 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2554 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2555 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002556
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002557Tests
2558-----
2559
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002560- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002561 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2562 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2563 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2564 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2565 pydoc.)
2566
2567- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2568
2569- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002570
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002571Windows
2572-------
2573
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002574- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2575 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2576 time).
2577
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002578- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2579 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2580
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002581- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2582 release without strong cryptography.
2583
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002584- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002585 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002586
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002587- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2588 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2589
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002590Mac
2591---
2592
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002593- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2594 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002595
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002596- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2597 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2598 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002599
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002600- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2601 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002602
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002603- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2604 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2605 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2606 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002607
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002608- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002609 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2610 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2611 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002612
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002613
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002614What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002615=================================
2616
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002617*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002619Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002620--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002621
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002622- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2623
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002624- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2625 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002626 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002627 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002628 a different meaning than before.
2629
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002630- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002631 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002632 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002633
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002634- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002635 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002636 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002637
2638- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2639 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2640 and deallocation.
2641
2642- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2643 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2644
2645- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2646 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2647 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2648 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2649 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2650
2651- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2652 now detected by the garbage collector.
2653
2654- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2655 [SF bug 519621]
2656
2657- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2658 identifier.
2659
2660- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2661 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2662 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2663 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2664 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2665 [SF bug 563060]
2666
2667- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2668 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2669 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2670 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2671 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2672
2673- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2674 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2675 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2676
2677- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2678
2679- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2680 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2681 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2682 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2683 state of the slots would be lost.)
2684
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002685Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002686-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002687
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002688- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002689 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2690 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2691 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2692 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002693 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2694 Jython 2.1.
2695
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002696- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002697 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002698 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2699 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2700 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2701 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2702 these, see PEP 302.
2703
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002704- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2705 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2706 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2707
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002708- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2709 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2710 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2711
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002712- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2713 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2714 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2715
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002716- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2717 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2718 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2719 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2720 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2721 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2722 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2723 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2724 releases or implementations.
2725
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002726- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002727 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2728 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002729
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002730- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2731 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2732
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002733- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2734 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2735 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2736
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002737- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2738 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2739
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002740- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2741 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002742 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2743 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002744
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002745- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2746 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2747 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2748 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2749 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2750
2751 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2752 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2753 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2754 pattern.
2755
2756 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2757 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2758 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2759 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2760
2761 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2762 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2763 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2764 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2765 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2766 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2767
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002768- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2769 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2770 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2771 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2772 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2773 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2774 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2775 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002776
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002777- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2778 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2779 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2780 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2781 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002782 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2783 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2784 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2785 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2786 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2787 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2788 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002789
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002790- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2791 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2792
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002793- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2794 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2795 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2796 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2797 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2798 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2799 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2800 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2801 to Zack Weinberg!
2802
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002803- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2804 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2805 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2806 type. This has been fixed now.
2807
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002808- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2809 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2810 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2811
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002812- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2813 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2814 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2815 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2816 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2817 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2818 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2819 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002820 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002821
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002822- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2823 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2824 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002825
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002826- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2827 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2828 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2829 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2830 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2831 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2832 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2833 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002834 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002835 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2836 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2837
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002838- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2839 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2840 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2841 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2842 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2843 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2844 this.)
2845
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002846- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2847 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002848 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002849 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002850 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2851 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002852 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2853 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002854
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002855- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2856 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2857 currently running.
2858
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002859- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2860 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2861 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2862 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2863
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002864- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2865 as directory names.
2866
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002867- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2868 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2869
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002870- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2871 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2872
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002873- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002874 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2875 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002876
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002877- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2878 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2879 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2880 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2881 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2882
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002883- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2884 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2885 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2886 removed.
2887
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002888- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2889 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2890 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2891
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002892- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2893 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2894 to __debug__.
2895
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002896- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2897 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2898 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2899
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002900- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2901 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2902 deprecated now.
2903
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002904- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2905 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2906 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002907
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002908- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2909 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2910 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2911 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2912 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002913
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002914- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2915 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2916
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002917- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2918 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2919 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002920 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002921 is backward compatible.
2922
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002923- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2924 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2925 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2926 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2927 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2928
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002929- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2930 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2931 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2932 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2933 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2934 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002935
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002936- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2937 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2938
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002939- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2940 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2941
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002942- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2943 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2944 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2945 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2946 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2947
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002948- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2949 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2950 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2951
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002952- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002953 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2954
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002955- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2956 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2957 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002958
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002959- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2960 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2961
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002962- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2963 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2964 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2965
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002966- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2967
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002968Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002970
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002971- Added three operators to the operator module:
2972 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2973 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2974 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2975
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002976- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2977
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002978- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2979 archives.
2980
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002981- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2982 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2983 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2984
2985 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2986
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002987- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2988 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2989 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002990 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002991
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002992- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2993 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2994 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2995 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002996 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2997 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2998 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2999 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003000
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003001- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3002 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003003
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003004- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3005
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003006- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3007 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3008
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003009- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3010 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3011 supported.
3012
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003013- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3014
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003015- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3016 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003017
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003018- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3019 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3020
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003021- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3022
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003023- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3024 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3025
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003026- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3027 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3028 functions but callable type objects.
3029
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003030- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003031 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003032 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003033
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003034- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3035 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003036
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003037- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3038 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003039
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003040- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3041 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3042 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3043 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3044
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003045- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3046 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003047
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003048- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3049 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3050 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3051 and __imul__.
3052
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003053- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003054 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3055 is called.
3056
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003057- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3058 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3059 interpreter was compiled.
3060
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003061- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3062 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3063 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003064 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003065 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3066 1, not 2.
3067
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003068- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3069 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3070 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3071 limit.
3072
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003073- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3074 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3075 bug #623464.
3076
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003077- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3078 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3079 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3080 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3081
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003082Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003084
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003085- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3086
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003087- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3088 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3089 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3090 with Python 2.3a2.
3091
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003092- os.path exposes getctime.
3093
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003094- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003095 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003096 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003097 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003098 unit tests of floating point results.
3099
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003100- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3101 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3102 has been increased.
3103
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003104- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3105 executed.
3106
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003107- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3108 postinstallation script.
3109
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003110- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3111 test the current module.
3112
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003113- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003114 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3115 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3116 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3117 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3118
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003119- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003120 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003121 Ward's Optik package.
3122
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003123- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3124 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3125 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3126 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3127
3128- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3129 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003130 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003131
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003132- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3133 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3134 shelf are binary pickles.
3135
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003136- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3137 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3138
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003139- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3140 modules are iterators now.
3141
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003142- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3143 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3144 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3145 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3146 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3147 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003148
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003149- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3150 with their entity value.
3151
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003152- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3153
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003154- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3155 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003156
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003157- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3158 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003159 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003160
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003161- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3162 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3163 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3164 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3165 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3166 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3167 main():
3168
3169 import locale
3170 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3171
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003172- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3173 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3174
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003175- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3176 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3177 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3178 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3179 to the new standard.
3180
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003181- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3182 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3183 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3184 an extension to the database.
3185
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003186- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3187 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3188 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3189 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003190 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003191
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003192- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003193 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003194
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003195- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3196 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3197 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3198 bounded integers.
3199
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003200- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3201 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3202 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3203 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3204 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3205 in existence.
3206
3207 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3208 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3209 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3210 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3211 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3212 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3213
3214 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3215 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3216 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3217 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3218
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003219- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3220 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3221 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3222
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003223- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3224
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003225- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3226 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3227 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3228 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3229
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003230- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3231 argument.
3232
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003233- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3234 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3235 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3236 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3237 [SF patch 560794].
3238
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003239- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3240 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3241 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003242 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3243 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3244 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003245
3246- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3247 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003248
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003249- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3250 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3251 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3252 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003253
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003254- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3255 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3256 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3257 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3258 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3259
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003260- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003261
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003262- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3263
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003264- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3265 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3266 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3267 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3268 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3269 identical to None.
3270
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003271- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3272 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3273 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3274 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3275 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3276 results now.
3277
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003278- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3279 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3280
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003281- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3282 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3283 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3284 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3285 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3286 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3287 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3288 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3289
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003290- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3291
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003292- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3293 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3294
3295- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3296 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3297 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3298 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3299 and other systems.
3300
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003301- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3302 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3303 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3304 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 +00003305 work well with these.
3306
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003307- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3308
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003309- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003310 connections.
3311
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003312- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3313 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3314 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3315
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003316- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3317 sets
3318
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003319- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3320 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3321 name.
3322
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003323- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3324 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3325 passed in.
3326
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003327- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003328 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003329 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3330 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003331
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003332- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3333
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003334- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3335
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003336- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3337 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3338 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3339
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003340- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3341 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3342 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3343 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003344 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003345
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003346- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003347 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003348 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003349
3350- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3351 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3352 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3353
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003354- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003355 the value of its expression argument.
3356
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003357- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3358 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3359 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3360
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003361- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3362 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3363 skipstone browser was included.
3364
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003365- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3366 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3367
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003368Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003369-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003370
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003371- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3372 names in addition to accepting file names.
3373
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003374- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3375 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3376 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3377 still used and useful.)
3378
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003379- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3380 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3381 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3382 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003383
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003384- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3385 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3386 the generated binary.
3387
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003388Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003389-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003390
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003391- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3392
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003393- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3394 except in the hands of experts.
3395
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003396- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003397 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3398 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3399 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003400
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003401- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3402 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3403 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3404 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3405 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3406 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3407 builds.
3408
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003409- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3410 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3411 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3412 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3413 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3414 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3415 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3416 new type.
3417
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003418- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003419
3420 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3421 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3422 positive infinities.
3423
3424 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3425 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3426 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3427 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3428 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3429 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3430 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3431
3432 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3433
3434 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3435
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003436- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3437 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3438 size of the executable.
3439
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003440- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3441 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3442 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3443 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003444
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003445- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3446
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003447- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3448 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3449 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003450
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003451- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3452 well as Unix.
3453
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003454- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3455 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3456 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3457 modules in the README file for details.
3458
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003459C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003461
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003462- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3463 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003464 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003465 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003466 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003467
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003468- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3469 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3470 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3471 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3472 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3473 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003474 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003475 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3476 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3477 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3478 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3479 aligned.)
3480
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003481- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3482 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3483 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3484
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003485- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3486 level.
3487
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003488- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3489 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3490 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3491 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3492 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3493
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003494- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3495 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3496 code.
3497
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003498- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3499 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3500 adjusting for negative indices.
3501
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003502- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3503 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3504 object.
3505
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003506- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3507 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3508 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3509
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003510- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3511 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003512
3513- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3514
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003515- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3516 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3517 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3518 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3519
3520- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3521
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003522- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003523
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003524- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003525 without going through the buffer API.
3526
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003528
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003529- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3530 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3531 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3532 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3533
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003534- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3535 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3536
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003537- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003538 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3539
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003540New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003542
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003543- OpenVMS is now supported.
3544
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003545- AtheOS is now supported.
3546
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003547- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3548
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003549- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3550
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003551Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----
3553
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003554- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3555 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3556 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003557
3558Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003559-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003560
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003561- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3562 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3563 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3564 bugs.
3565 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003566 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003567 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3568 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003569 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003570
3571- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003572 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003573
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003574- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3575 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3576
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003577- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3578 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003579 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003580 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3581
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003582- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3583 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3584 use files" uninstall option).
3585
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003586- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3587
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003588- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3589 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3590
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003591- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3592 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3593 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3594
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003595- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3596 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3597 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3598 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3599 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003600 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3601 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3602 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003603
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003604- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003605 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003606 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3607 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3608 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3609 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3610 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3611 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3612 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3613 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3614 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3615 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3616 work around.
3617
3618- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3619 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3620 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3621 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3622 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3623 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3624 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3625 specified with O_CREAT too).
3626
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003627Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628----
3629
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003630- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003631
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003632- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3633 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3634 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3635
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003636- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3637 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3638 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3639
3640- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3641 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3642 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3643 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3644 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3645 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3646 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3647 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003648
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003649- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3650 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3651 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003652
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003653- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3654 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3655 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3656 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3657 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003658
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003659- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3660 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3661 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003662
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003663- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3664 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003665
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003666- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3667 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3668 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3669 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3670 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003671
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003672- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3673 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3674 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3675
3676- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3677 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3678 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003679
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003680- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3681 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3682 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3683 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003684 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003685
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003686- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3687 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003688
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003689- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3690 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003691
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003692- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003693 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003694 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3695 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003696
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003697
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003698What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003699===============================
3700
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3702
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003703Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003705
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003706- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3707 with a custom metaclass.
3708
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003709Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003711
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003712- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3713 are proxies.
3714
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003715Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003717
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003718- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3719 very short strings.
3720
3721- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3722 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3723 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3724 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3725 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3726
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003727Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003729
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003730- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3731 close or delete time).
3732
3733- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3734 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3735
3736- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3737
3738- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003739 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003740
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003741Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003743
3744Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003745-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003746
3747C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003749
3750New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003752
3753Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003755
3756Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003758
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003759- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3760
3761- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3762 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3763
3764- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3765 deleted at process exit time.
3766
3767- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3768 in backslash.
3769
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003770Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003772
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003773- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3774 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3775 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3776
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003777
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003778What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003779===========================
3780
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003781*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3782
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003783Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003785
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003786- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3787 been extensively updated. See
3788
3789 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3790
3791 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3792
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003793- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3794 deleted!
3795
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003796- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3797 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3798 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3799 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3800 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3801
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003802- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3803
3804 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3805 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3806
3807 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3808 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3809 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3810 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3811 supported anyway.
3812
3813 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3814 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3815
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003816- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3817 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3818 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3819 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3820 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003821
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003822- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3823 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3824 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3825
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003826Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003827-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003828
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003829- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3830 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3831 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3832 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3833 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3834 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003835 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3836 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3837 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3838 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003839
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003840- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3841 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3842 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3843
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003844Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003846
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003847- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3848
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003849Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003851
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003852- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3853 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3854 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3855 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3856 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3857 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3858
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003859- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3860
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003861- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3862
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003863- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3864
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003865- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3866 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3867 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3868
3869- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3870
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003871Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003873
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003874- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3875 off a search on Google.
3876
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003877Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003878-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003879
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003880- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3881 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3882 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3883 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3884 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3885 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3886 other platforms should do likewise.
3887
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003888- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3889 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3890 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3891
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003892C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003894
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003895- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3896 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3897 producing key-value pairs.
3898
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003899- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003900 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003901 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3902 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3903 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3904 previously went unchallenged.
3905
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003906New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003908
3909Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003911
3912Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003914
3915Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003917
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003918- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3919 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003920
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003921- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3922 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3923 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3924 home.
3925
3926
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003927What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003928===========================
3929
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003930*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3931
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003932Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003934
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003935- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3936 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003937
3938 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003939 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003940
3941 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3942 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003943 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003944 This needs to be documented.
3945
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003946- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3947 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3948
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003949- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3950 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3951 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3952
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003953- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3954 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3955
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003956- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3957 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3958 class forbids it).
3959
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003960- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3961 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3962 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3963
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003964- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3965
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003966Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003968
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003969- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3970 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003971 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003972
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003973- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3974 (like 1 + '').
3975
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003976Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003978
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003979- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3980 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3981 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3982 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003983 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003984 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3985
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003986- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3987 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3988 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3989 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3990
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003991- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3992 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003993 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3994 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3995 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003996
3997- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3998 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003999
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004000- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4001 bytes on its input.
4002
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004003Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004005
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004006- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004007 convenience function.
4008
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004009- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4010 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4011 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004012 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4013 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4014 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4015 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4016 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4017 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004018
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004019- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4020 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4021 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4022 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4023
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004024- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4025 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4026 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4027
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004028- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4029 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4030 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4031 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4032
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004033- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4034 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004036 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4037 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4038 new -l and -e options.
4039
4040- statcache is now deprecated.
4041
4042- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4043 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004045 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4046 time properly taken into account.
4047
4048- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4049 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4050 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4051 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4052
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004053Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004055
4056Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004058
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004059- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4060 is built with libdb3 if available.
4061
4062- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4063
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004064C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004066
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004067- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4068 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4069 PySequence_Size().
4070
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004071- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4072
4073- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4074 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4075 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4076
4077- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4078 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4079
4080- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4081 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4082
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004083New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004085
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004086- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4087 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4088
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004089- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4090 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4091
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004092- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4093
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004094Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004096
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004097- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4098 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4099
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004100Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004101-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004102
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004103Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004105
4106- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4107 removed completely in the next release.
4108
4109- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4110 OSX.
4111
4112- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4113 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4114
4115- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4116
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004117
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004118What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004119===========================
4120
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4122
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004123Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004125
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004126- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004127 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004128 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004129 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4130 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004131 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4132 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004133 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4134 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004135
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004136- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4137 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4138
4139- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4140 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4141
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004142Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004144
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004145- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4146 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4147 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4148 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4149 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4150 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4151 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4152 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4153
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004154- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4155 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4156 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4157 example).
4158
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004159- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004160 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004161 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004162 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004163
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004164- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4165 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4166 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004167 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004168
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004169- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4170 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4171 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4172 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4173 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4174 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4175
4176 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4177
4178 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4179
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004180Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004182
4183- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4184
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004185- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4186
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004187- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4188 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004189
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004190- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4191 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4192 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4193 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4194 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4195 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004196 attributes.
4197
4198- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4199 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4200 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004201
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004202- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4203 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4204 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004205
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004206- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4207 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4208 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004209 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4210 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4211
4212- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4213 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004214
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004215Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004217
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004218- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4219 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4220
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004221- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4222 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4223 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4224 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4225
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004226- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4227 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4228 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4229 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4230
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004231 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4232 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4233 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4234 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4235 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4236 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4237 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4238 without losing information).
4239
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004240- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004241 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4242 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4243 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4244 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4245 module).
4246
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004247 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004248 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4249 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4250 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4251 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004252
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004253- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004254 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4255 encoding.
4256
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004257- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4258 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4259
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004261 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4262
4263- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4264 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4265 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4266 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4267
4268- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4269
4270- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4271 ON, and OFF.
4272
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004273- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4274 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4275
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004276Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004278
4279- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4280 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4281 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004282
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004283- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4284 been added: -X and -E.
4285
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004286Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004288
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004289- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4290 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4291
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004292C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004294
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004295- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4296 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4297 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4298 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4299 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4300
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004301- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4302 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4303 as long) arguments.
4304
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004305- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4306 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4307 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4308 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4309 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4310 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4311
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004312- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4313 input.
4314
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004315New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004316-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004317
4318Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004320
4321Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004323
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004324- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4325 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4326 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4327
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004328- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4329 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4330 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004331 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004332
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4334 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4335 import signal
4336 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004339 while 1:
4340 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004342 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4343 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4344 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4345 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004346
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004347
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004348What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4349===========================
4350
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4352
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004353Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004355
4356- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4357 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4358 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4359
4360- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4361 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4362 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4363 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4364 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4365 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4366 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004367
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004368- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004369 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004370 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4371 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4372 associate a docstring with a property.
4373
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004374- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4375 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4376 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4377 other built-in object types.
4378
4379- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4380 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4381 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4382 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4383 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4384
4385- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4386 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4387
4388- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4389 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004390 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004391 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4392 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4393 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4394 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4395 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4396
4397- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4398 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4399 class.
4400
4401- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4402 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4403 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4404 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4405
4406- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4407 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4408 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4409 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4410
4411- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4412 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4413
4414- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4415 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4416 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4417 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4418 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004419 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004420 with the same value as s.
4421
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004422- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4423
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004424Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004426
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004427- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4428
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004429- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4430 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4431 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4432 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4433 objects.
4434
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004435- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4436 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004437 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4438 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4439
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004440- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4441 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4442 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4443
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004444Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004446
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004447- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4448 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4449 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4450 by the instances.
4451
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004452- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4453 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4454 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4455
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004456- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4457 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4458 before the entire comparison is complete.
4459
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004460- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4461 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4462 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4463
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004464- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4465 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4466 getwriter().
4467
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004468- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4469 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4470
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004471- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004472 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4473 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4474
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004475- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4476 iterable object.
4477
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004478- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4479 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004480
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004481- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4482 authentication.
4483
4484- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4485 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004486
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004487- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004488 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4489 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4490 a sample driver.)
4491
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004492Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004494
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004495- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4496 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4497 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4498 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4499 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4500 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4501 kernel has large file support.
4502
4503- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4504 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4505 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4506 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4507 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4508
4509- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4510 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4511 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4512
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004513C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004515
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004516- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4517 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4518
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004519New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004521
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004522- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4523 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4524
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004525Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004527
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004528- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4529 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4530 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4531 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4532 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4533
4534- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4535 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4536 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4537 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4538
4539- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4540 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4541
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004542Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004544
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004545- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004546 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4547 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004548
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004549
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004550What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4551===========================
4552
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4554
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004555Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004557
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004558- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4559 big to represent as a C double.
4560
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004561- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4562 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4563 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4564 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4565 restriction).
4566
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004567- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4568 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4569 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4570 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4571 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4572
4573 >>> dir([])
4574 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4575 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4576 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4577 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4578 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4579 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4580 'reverse', 'sort']
4581
4582 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4583
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004584- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004585 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4586 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4587 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4588 OverflowError exception.
4589
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004590- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004591 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004592 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4593 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4594 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4595 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4596 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004597 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4599 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4600
4601 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4602 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4603 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4604 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004605
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004606- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004607 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4608 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4609 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4610 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4611 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4612 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4613 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4614 once it is created.
4615
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004616- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4617 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4618 (key, value) pairs.
4619
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004620- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004621 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4622 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4623
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004624- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4625 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4626 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4627 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4628 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004629
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004630- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004631 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4632 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4633
4634 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4635
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004636- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004637 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4638
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004639Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004641
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004642- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004643 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4644 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004645
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004646- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4647 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4648 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4649 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4650 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4651 in this area anymore).
4652
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004653- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4654 threading.Timer.
4655
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004656- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4657 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4658
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004659- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004660 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4661
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004662- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004663 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4664 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4665 converted to Python longs.
4666
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004667- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004668 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4669
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004670- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4671 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4672 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4673
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004674Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004676
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004677- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4678 division operators as per PEP 238.
4679
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004680Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004682
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004683- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4684 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4685 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4686 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4687
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004688C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004690
4691- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004692
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004693- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4694 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004695 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4698 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004699 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004701
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004702- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004703 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4704 module:
4705
4706 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004707
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004708 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4709 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004710
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004711 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4712 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004713
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004714 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4715
4716 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4717
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004718- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004719 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4720 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4721 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004722
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004723New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004725
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004726- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4727 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4728 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4729 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4730 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004731
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004732Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004734
4735Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004737
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004738- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4739 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4740 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4741 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004742 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4743 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4744 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4745 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4746 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004747
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004748- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004749 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4750
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004751
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004752What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4753===========================
4754
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4756
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004757Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004759
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004760- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4761 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4762
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004763- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4764 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4765 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004766
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004767- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4768 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4769 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4770 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004771
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004772- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4773
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004775
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004776Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004777-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004778
4779- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004780 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004781 the module docstring for details.
4782
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004783Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004785
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004786- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004787 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4788 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4789 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004790
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004791- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4792 Nick Mathewson.
4793
4794Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004796
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004797- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4798 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4799 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4800 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4801 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4802 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4803 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4804 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4805
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004806- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4807 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4808 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4809 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4810
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004811- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4812 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4813 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4814 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4815 come a long way).
4816
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004817- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4818 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4819 write filters for these warnings).
4820
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004821- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4822 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4823 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4824 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4825 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4826
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004827- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4828 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4829 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4830 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4831 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4832 older distribution.
4833
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004834Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004836
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004837- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4838 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004839 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004840
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004841- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4842 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4843 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4844
4845- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4846
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004847- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4848
4849- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4850
4851- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4852
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004854
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004855- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4856
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004857New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004859
4860C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004862
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004863- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4864 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4865 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4866 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4867 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4868 against buffer overruns.
4869
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004870- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004871 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4872 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004873 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4874 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4875 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4876
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004877- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4878 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4879 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4880 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4881 deprecated.
4882
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004883Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004885
4886- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4887 relevant is found.
4888
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004889
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004890What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004891===========================
4892
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004893*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4894
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004895Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004896----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004897
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004898- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4899 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4900 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4901 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4902 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4903 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4904 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4905 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004906 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004907 repaired.
4908
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004909- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004910 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004911 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4912 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4913 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4914 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4915 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4916 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4917 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4918 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4919
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004920- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4921 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4922 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4923 leading BMO character).
4924
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004925- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4926 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4927 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4928
4929 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4930 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4931 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004932
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004933 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4934 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4935 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4936 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4937 for various simple to use conversions.
4938
4939 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4940 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4941
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4943 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4944 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4945 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4946 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4947 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4948 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4949 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4950 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4951 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4952 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4953 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4954 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4955 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4956 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004957
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004958- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4959 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4960 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004961 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004962 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004963
4964 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004965 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4966 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4967 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4968 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4969 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004970 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4971 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004972
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004973 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4974 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4975 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004976 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004977
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004978- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4979 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4980 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4981 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4982 floating arithmetic,
4983
4984 x = 9007199254740992.0
4985 print long(x)
4986
4987 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4988 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4989 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4990 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4991 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4992 functions are of good quality).
4993
4994 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4995 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4996 algorithms to break.
4997
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004998- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4999 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5000 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5001 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5002 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5003 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5004 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5005 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5006 order.
5007
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005008- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5009 operation along the most common code paths.
5010
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005011- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5012 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5013
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005014- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5015 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5016 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5017 {}.update(UserDict())
5018
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005019- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5020 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5021 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5022 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5023 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5024 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5025 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5026 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5027
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005028- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005029 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005030
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005031 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005032 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5033 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005034 join() method of strings
5035 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005036 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5037 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005038 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005039 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005040
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005041- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5042 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5043
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005044- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5045 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5046
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005047- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5048 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5049 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5050 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5051
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005052- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5053 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005054 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005055 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5056 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005057
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005058- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5059
5060
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005061Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005062-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005063
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005064- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005065 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005066 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5067 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5068
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005069- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5070 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5071
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005072- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5073 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5074 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5075 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5076
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005077- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5078 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5079 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5080
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005081- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5082
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005083- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5084
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005085- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5086 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5087 that are still imported into string.py).
5088
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005089- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5090
5091- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5092 Now it does.
5093
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005094- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5095
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005096- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5097 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5098 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5099 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5100 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005101 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5102 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005103
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005104- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5105 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5106 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5107 'help(object)'.
5108
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005109Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005111
5112- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005113 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005114 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5115 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5116
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005117- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005118 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5119 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005120
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005121C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005123
5124- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5125 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126
5127----
5128
5129**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**