blob: 7b27e49cb00acb987c754702dfa97d9708bf8530 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000015- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
16
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000017- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
18 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
19
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000020- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
21 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
22 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
23
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000024- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
25 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000026 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000027
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000028- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
29 now encodes backslash correctly.
30
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000031- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
32
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000033- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
34 and long longs.
35
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000036- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
37 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
38 message in this case.
39
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000040- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
41 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
42 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
43 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
44 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
45
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000046- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000047
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000048- Speed up some Unicode operations.
49
50- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
51
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000052- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000053 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
54
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000055- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
56
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000057- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
58 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
59
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000060- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
61
62- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
63
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000064- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
65 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
66 was empty.
67
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000068- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
69 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
70
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000071- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000072 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000073
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000074- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
75 codes.
76
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000077- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
78 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
79 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
80
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000081- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
82 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
83
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000084- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000085 (fixes bug #1119418).
86
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000087- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
88
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000089- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
90 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
91
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000092- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
93 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
94 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
95
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000096- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
97
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000098- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
99 reference counts in some error exit cases.
100
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000101- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
102 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
103 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
104 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
105 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
106 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
107 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
108 realloc.
109
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000110- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
111 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
112
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000113- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
114 like their int counterparts.
115
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000116- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
117 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
118 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
119 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
120 for a longer write-up of the problem).
121
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000122- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
123 serializing floats.
124
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000125- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
126 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
127 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
128
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000129- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
130 278.
131
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000132- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
133 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
134 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
135 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000136 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000137 PyNumber_*().
138 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
139
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000140- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
141 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
142 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
143 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
144
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000145- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
146 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
147 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
148 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
149 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
150
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000151- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
152 disabled caused a crash.
153
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000154- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
155 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
156
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000157- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000158 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
159
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000160- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
161
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000162- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000163 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
164 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
165 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000166
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000167- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
168
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000169- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
170 returning None.
171
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000172- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000173 ('\') with a specific error message.
174
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000175- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
176
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000177- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
178 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
179
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000180- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000181 an ferror() call.
182
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000183- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
184 list.sort().
185
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000186- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
187 (2+3) --> (5).
188
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000189- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
190
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000191- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
192 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000193
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000194- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
195 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
196 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
197
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000198- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
199 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
200 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
201
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000202Extension Modules
203-----------------
204
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000205- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
206
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000207- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
208 problem on AIX.
209
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000210- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
211
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000212- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
213
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000214- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
215
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000216- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
217 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
218
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000219- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
220
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000221- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
222 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
223
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000224- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
225
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000226- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
227 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
228
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000229- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
230 returns in cStringIO.c.
231
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000232- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
233 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
234
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000235- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
236
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000237- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
238
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000239- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
240 the file system encoding.
241
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000242- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
243 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000244
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000245- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
246
247- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000248 line without newlines.
249
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000250- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
251 on Windows.
252
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000253- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000254 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
255
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000256- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
257 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
258 for large or negative values.
259
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000260- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000261 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000262
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000263- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
264
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000265- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
266 if available on the platform.
267
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000268- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
269 available on the platform.
270
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000271- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
272 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
273
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000274- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
275
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000276- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
277 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
278 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
279
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000280- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
281
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000282- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
283 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
284
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000285- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000286 file size.
287
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000288- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
289
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000290- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
291 {remove_history,replace_history}
292
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000293- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
294 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000295
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000296- stat_float_times is now True.
297
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000298- array.array objects are now picklable.
299
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000300- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
301 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
302
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000303- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
304 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
305 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
306
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000307- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
308 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000309
310Library
311-------
312
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000313- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000314 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
315 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
316 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
317 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
318
319 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
320 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
321 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
322 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
323 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000324
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000325- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
326 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
327 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
328
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000329- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
330
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000331- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
332
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000333- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
334 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
335 illegal argument)
336
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000337- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
338 is an error in the format string.
339
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000340- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
341
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000342- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000343 "parent" argument.
344
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000345- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
346 for padding.
347
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000348- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
349 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
350
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000351- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
352 to get the correct encoding.
353
354- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
355 languages.
356
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000357- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
358
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000359- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
360
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000361- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
362
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000363- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
364 functionality.
365
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000366- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
367
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000368- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
369 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
370
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000371- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
372 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
373 match the Content-Length header.
374
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000375- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
376
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000377- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
378 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000379 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000380
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000381- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
382
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000383- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
384
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000385- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
386 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
387
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000388- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
389 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
390 Tkdnd.
391
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000392- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
393 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
394
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000395- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
396 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
397
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000398- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000399 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
400
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000401- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
402 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
403
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000404- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
405 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
406
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000407- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000408 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000409
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000410- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
411
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000412- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
413 error messages.
414
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000415- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
416
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000417- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
418 Bug #1224621.
419
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000420- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
421 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
422 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
423 terminates by raising StopIteration.
424
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000425- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
426
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000427- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
428 component of the path.
429
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000430- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
431 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
432 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
433 class at all.
434
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000435- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
436 files to PyPI.
437
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000438- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
439 them to PyPI.
440
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000441- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
442 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
443 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
444 work as expected.
445
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000446- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
447 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
448
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000449- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000450 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
451
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000452- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
453
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000454- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
455 to build.
456
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000457- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
458 symbolic links on Windows.
459
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000460- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000461 profile.py if available.
462
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000463- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
464
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000465- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
466 in LWPCookieJar.
467
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000468- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
469
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000470- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
471
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000472- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
473
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000474- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
475
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000476- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
477
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000478- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
479
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000480- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
481
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000482- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
483
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000484- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
485 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
486 be exploited in various ways.
487
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000488- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000489 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
490
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000491- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
492 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
493
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000494- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000495 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
496
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000497- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
498
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000499- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
500
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000501- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
502
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000503- Enhancements to the csv module:
504
505 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000506 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000507 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000508 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
509 reporting.
510 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
511 dictates.
512 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000513 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000514 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000515 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
516 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000517 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
518 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000519 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000520 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
521 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
522 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
523 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
524 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
525 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
526 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
527 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
528 without first creating a dialect class.
529 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
530 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
531 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000532 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000533 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
534 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000535 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
536 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
537 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
538 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000539 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
540 This has been fixed.
541
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000542- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
543 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
544 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
545 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
546
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000547- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
548
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000549- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
550 (Bug #951915).
551
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000552- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
553 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
554 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000555 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000556
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000557- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
558
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000559- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
560 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
561
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000562- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
563
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000564- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
565
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000566- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
567
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000568- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
569
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000570- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
571
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000572- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
573 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
574 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
575
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000576- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000577 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000578
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000579- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
580 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
581 tokenizer with very long source lines.
582
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000583- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
584 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
585
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000586- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
587 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000588
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000589- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
590 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
591
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000592- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
593 correctly.
594
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000595- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
596 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
597 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
598 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
599 between two lines.
600
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000601- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
602 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
603 handlers.
604
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000605- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000606 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
607 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000608
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000609- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
610 considering it exactly like a '*'.
611
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000612- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
613 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000614
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000615- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
616
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000617Build
618-----
619
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000620- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
621 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
622
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000623- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
624 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
625
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000626- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
627 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
628 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000629 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000630
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000631- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
632 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
633 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
634
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000635- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
636
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000637- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
638 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
639
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000640- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
641 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
642 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
643 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
644 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
645 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
646 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
647 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
648
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000649- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
650 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
651 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
652 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
653
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000654
655C API
656-----
657
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000658- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
659
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000660- Removed PyRange_New().
661
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000662- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
663 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
664 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
665 mappings.
666
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000667
668Tests
669-----
670
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000671- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000672
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000673- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
674 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
675
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000676
677Documentation
678-------------
679
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000680- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
681
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000682- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
683
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000684- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
685
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000686- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
687
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000688- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
689
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000690- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
691
692- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
693
694- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
695
696- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
697
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000698- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
699 Closes bug #1166582.
700
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000701- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
702 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
703 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
704
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000705Mac
706---
707
708
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000709New platforms
710-------------
711
712- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
713
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000714
715Tools/Demos
716-----------
717
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000718- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
719 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
720 source files that need an encoding declaration.
721 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
722
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000723- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
724
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000725- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000726
727
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000728What's New in Python 2.4 final?
729===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000730
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000731*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000732
733Core and builtins
734-----------------
735
736- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
737 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
738 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
739
740
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000741What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
742==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000743
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000744*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000745
746Core and builtins
747-----------------
748
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000749- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
750 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
751 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
752
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000753
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000754Library
755-------
756
757- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
758 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
759 raised is re-raised.
760
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000761- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
762 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
763
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000764- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
765 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
766 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
767 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
768 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
769 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
770 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
771 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
772 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
773 by the slice are recomputed now.
774
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000775- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000776
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000777Build
778-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000779
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000780- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
781 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
782 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000783
784C API
785-----
786
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000787- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
788
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000789
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000790What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
791================================
792
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000793*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000794
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000795License
796-------
797
798The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
799is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
800changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
801Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
802intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
803durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
804the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
805License::
806
807 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
808
809says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
810to Python 2.1.1.
811
812The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
813License Version 2.
814
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000815Core and builtins
816-----------------
817
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000818- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
819 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
820 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
821 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
822 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
823 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
824 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000825 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000826 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
827 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
828
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000829- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000830
831Extension Modules
832-----------------
833
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000834- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
835 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
836 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
837 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000838
839Library
840-------
841
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000842- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
843 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
844 returned.
845
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000846- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
847
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000848- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
849 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
850
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000851- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
852
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000853- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
854 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000855
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000856- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
857
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000858- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
859
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000860- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000861 the source code is updated and reloaded.
862
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000863Build
864-----
865
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000866- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000867
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000868What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
869================================
870
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000871*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000872
873Core and builtins
874-----------------
875
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000876- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000877 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
878
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000879- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
880 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
881 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
882 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
883
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000884- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
885 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
886
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000887- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
888 constant.
889
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000890- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
891 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
892 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
893 large), and to anomalies such as
894 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
895 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
896 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
897 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000898
899Extension modules
900-----------------
901
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000902- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
903 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000904 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
905 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
906 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000907
908Library
909-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000910
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000911- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000912 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000913 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
914 --swig-cpp.
915
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000916- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
917 it is set.
918
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000919- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000920
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000921- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
922 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
923 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
924 Closes bug #1039270.
925
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000926- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000927
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000928 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000929 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
930 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
931 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
932 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
933 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
934 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
935 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
936 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
937 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
938 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
939 + Updates to documentation.
940
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000941- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
942 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
943 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
944 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
945
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000946- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000947
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000948- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
949 applications should use the getmember function.
950
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000951- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
952
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000953- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
954 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
955 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
956 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
957 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
958 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
959 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
960 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
961 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
962
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000963- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
964 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000965 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000966
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000967- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
968 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
969 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
970 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
971 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
972 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
973 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
974 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000975
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000976- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
977 the new public features (of which there are many).
978
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000979- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000980 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
981 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
982 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
983 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000984 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000985
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000986- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
987
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000988- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
989 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
990 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
991 options.
992
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000993- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
994 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
995 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
996 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
997 conditions under which non-string values work.
998
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000999Build
1000-----
1001
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001002- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1003 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1004 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1005
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001006- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1007 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1008 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1009 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1010 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001011
1012C API
1013-----
1014
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001015- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1016 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1017
1018- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1019
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001020- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1021 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1022 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1023 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1024 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1025 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1026 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1027 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1028 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1029
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001030- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1031
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001032- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1033 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1034 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001035
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001036Tests
1037-----
1038
1039- test__locale ported to unittest
1040
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001041Mac
1042---
1043
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001044- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1045 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1046 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001047
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001048Tools/Demos
1049-----------
1050
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001051- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1052 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1053 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1054 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1055 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001056
1057
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001058What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1059=================================
1060
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001061*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001062
1063Core and builtins
1064-----------------
1065
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001066- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001067 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1068
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001069- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1070 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1071 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1072 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1073 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1074 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1075 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1076 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001077 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1078 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1079 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1080 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1081 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001082
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001083- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1084 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1085 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1086 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1087 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1088
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001089- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1090
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001091- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1092 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1093
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001094- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1095 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1096 modified the list.
1097
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001098- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1099 functions is now writable.
1100
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001101- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1102 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1103 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1104 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1105
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001106- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1107 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1108 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1109 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1110 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001111
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001112- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1113 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1114
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001115Extension modules
1116-----------------
1117
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001118- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1119
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001120- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1121 data.
1122
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001123- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1124 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1125 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1126 supposed to have been truncated away.
1127
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001128- Added socket.socketpair().
1129
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001130- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1131 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1132
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001133- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001134 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1135
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001136Library
1137-------
1138
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001139- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001140 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001141
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001142- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1143 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1144
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001145- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1146 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1147
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001148- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1149
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001150- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1151 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001152
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001153- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1154 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1155
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001156- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1157
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001158- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1159
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001160- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1161
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001162- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1163 Percivall.
1164
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001165- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1166 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1167
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001168- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1169 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1170 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001171 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001172
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001173- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1174 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1175 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1176 and exponent.
1177
1178- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1179
1180- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001181 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001182 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1183
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001184- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1185 to the readline module.
1186
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001187- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001188 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1189 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001190
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001191- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1192 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1193 contains symlinks.
1194
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001195- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1196 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1197
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001198- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1199 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1200 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1201
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001202- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1203 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1204 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1205 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1206 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1207 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1208 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1209 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1210 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1211 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1212 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1213 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1214 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1215
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001216- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1217
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001218Tools/Demos
1219-----------
1220
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001221- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1222 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1223
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001224- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1225
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001226Build
1227-----
1228
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001229- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1230 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1231 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1232 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1233 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1234 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1235 plans to do so.
1236
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001237- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1238 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1239
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001240- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1241 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1242
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001243- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1244 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1245
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001246- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1247 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1248
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001249- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1250 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1251
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001252C API
1253-----
1254
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001255..
1256
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001257Documentation
1258-------------
1259
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001260- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1261 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1262
1263- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1264 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1265 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001266
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001267New platforms
1268-------------
1269
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001270- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1271
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001272Tests
1273-----
1274
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001275..
1276
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001277Windows
1278-------
1279
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001280- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1281 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1282 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1283 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1284 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1285 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1286 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1287 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1288 the problem.
1289
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001290Mac
1291---
1292
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001293..
1294
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001295
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001296What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1297=================================
1298
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001299*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001300
1301Core and builtins
1302-----------------
1303
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001304- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1305 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1306 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1307 sensitive code.
1308
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001309- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001310 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001311
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001312 @staticmethod
1313 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001314
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001315 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001316
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001317- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1318 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1319 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1320 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1321 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1322 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1323 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1324 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1325 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1326 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1327 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1328
1329 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1330 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1331 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1332 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1333 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1334 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1335 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1336
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001337- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1338 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1339
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001340- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001341 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001342
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001343- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001344 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001345 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1346
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001347- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001348 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1349 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1350
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001351- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1352 types that support garbage collection.
1353
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001354- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1355
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001356- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1357 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1358 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1359 Jython.
1360
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001361- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1362
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001363- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1364 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1365
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001366- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1367 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1368 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001369
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001370- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1371 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1372 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1373
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001374Extension modules
1375-----------------
1376
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001377- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1378
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001379Library
1380-------
1381
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001382- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1383 TIS-620
1384
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001385- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1386 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1387 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1388 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1389 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1390 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1391 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1392 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1393 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1394 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1395
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001396- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1397
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001398- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1399 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1400 same as when the argument is omitted).
1401 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1402
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001403- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1404
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001405- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1406 schemes are offered.
1407
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001408- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1409
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001410- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1411 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1412 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1413
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001414- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1415
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001416- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1417 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1418
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001419- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1420 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1421 when dummy_threading is being used.
1422
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001423- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1424 from a tarfile.
1425
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001426- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001427 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001428
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001429- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1430 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1431 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1432 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1433
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001434- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1435 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1436
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001437- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1438 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1439 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1440 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1441 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1442 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1443 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1444 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1445 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1446 by some other method in progress).
1447
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001448- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1449 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1450 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001451
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001452- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1453
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001454- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1455 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1456 AM Kuchling.
1457
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001458- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1459 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1460 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1461
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001462- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1463 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1464 instead of unsigned.
1465
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001466- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001467 no longer part of the public API.
1468
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001469- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1470 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1471 string methods of the same name).
1472
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001473- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001474 SF patch 945642.
1475
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001476- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1477
1478 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1479
1480 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1481 DocTestSuites.
1482
1483- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1484 that provide thread-local data.
1485
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001486- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1487 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1488
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001489- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1490
1491- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1492 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1493 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1494
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001495- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1496
1497 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1498 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1499 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001500
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001501 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1502 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1503 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1504 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1505
1506 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1507 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1508
1509 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1510 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1511 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1512 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1513
1514 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1515 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1516 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1517 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1518 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1519
1520 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1521 wrapping help output.
1522
1523 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1524 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1525 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001526
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001527C API
1528-----
1529
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001530- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1531 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1532 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1533 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1534 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1535 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1536 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1537 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1538 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1539 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1540 its visible semantics have not changed.
1541
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001542- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1543 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1544
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001545Documentation
1546-------------
1547
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001548- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001549
1550 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001551 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001552
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001553 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001554
1555 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1556
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001557- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001558
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001559Tests
1560-----
1561
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001562- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001563 platforms that use the Makefile.
1564
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001565- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1566 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1567 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1568
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001569
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001570What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1571=================================
1572
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001573*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001574
1575Core and builtins
1576-----------------
1577
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001578- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1579 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1580 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1581 objects now (one object instead of three).
1582
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001583- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1584 Windows DLLs.
1585
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001586- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1587 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001588
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001589- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1590 a new .pyc magic.
1591
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001592- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1593 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1594 be there.
1595
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001596- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1597 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1598 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1599
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001600- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1601 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1602 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1603
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001604- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1605
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001606- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1607 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1608 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001609
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001610- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1611 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1612
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001613- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1614
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001615- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001616 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001617
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001618- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1619
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001620- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1621
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001622- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1623 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1624
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001625- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1626 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1627 Fixes bug #858016 .
1628
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001629- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1630 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1631 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1632
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001633- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1634 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1635 improves their performance (about 35%).
1636
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001637- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1638 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1639 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1640
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001641- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1642 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1643 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1644 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1645
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001646- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1647 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001648 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001649 length is not known).
1650
1651- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1652 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001653 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1654 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001655 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1656
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001657- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1658 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1659
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001660- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1661 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1662 keyword arguments.
1663
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001664- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1665 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1666 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1667
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001668- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1669 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1670 cases.
1671
1672- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1673 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1674 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1675 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1676 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1677 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1678 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1679 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1680 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1681 a release build.
1682
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001683- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1684 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1685
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001686- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001687 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001688
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001689- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1690 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1691 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1692 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1693 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1694 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1695 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1696 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1697 destroyed.
1698
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001699- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1700 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1701 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1702 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1703 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1704 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1705 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1706 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1707
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001708- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1709 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1710 character other than a space.
1711
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001712- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1713 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1714 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1715 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1716 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1717 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1718 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1719 attributes with the same name.
1720
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001721- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1722 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1723 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1724 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1725 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1726 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1727 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1728 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1729 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1730 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1731 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1732 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1733 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1734 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001735
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001736- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1737 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1738 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1739 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1740 This has been repaired.
1741
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001742- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1743
1744- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1745
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001746- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1747 over a sequence.
1748
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001749- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001750 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001751
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001752- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1753
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001754- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1755 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1756 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1757 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1758 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1759 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1760 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1761 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1762
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001763- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1764 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1765 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1766
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001767- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1768 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1769 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1770 freelist.
1771
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001772- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1773 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1774
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001775- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1776 number.
1777
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001778- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1779 a TypeError exception.
1780
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001781- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1782 820195.
1783
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001784- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1785 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1786 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1787
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001788- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001789 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1790 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001791
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001792- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1793 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1794 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1795
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001796- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1797 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001798 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001799
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001800- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001801 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1802 the first call.
1803
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001804
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001805Extension modules
1806-----------------
1807
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001808- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1809 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1810
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001811- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1812 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1813 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1814 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1815 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1816 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1817 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001818
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001819- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1820
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001821- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1822
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001823- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1824 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1825
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001826- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1827 fewer false positives.
1828
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001829- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1830 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1831
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001832- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001833 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1834
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001835- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001836 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001837 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001838 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1839 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001840
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001841- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1842 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1843 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1844 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1845
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001846- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1847 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1848 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1849 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1850 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1851 #897625.
1852
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001853- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1854 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1855
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001856- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1857 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1858 and pops on either side of the deque.
1859
1860- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1861 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1862
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001863- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1864 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1865 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1866 other functions that expect a function argument.
1867
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001868- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1869
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001870- os.getsid was added.
1871
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001872- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1873 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1874 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1875
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001876- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1877
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001878- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1879
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001880- readline.clear_history was added.
1881
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001882- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1883
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001884- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1885
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001886- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1887
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001888- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1889
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001890- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1891
1892- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1893
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001894- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1895
1896- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1897
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001898- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1899 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1900 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1901
1902- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1903 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1904 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1905 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1906 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1907 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1908 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1909
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001910- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1911 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1912 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1913 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001914
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001915- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001916 iterators from a single iterable.
1917
1918- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1919 of raising a TypeError exception.
1920
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001921- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1922 as parameter.
1923
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001924Library
1925-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001926
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001927- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1928
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001929- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1930 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1931 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001932
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001933- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1934 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1935 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001936
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001937- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001938
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001939- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1940 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001941
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001942- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1943 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1944
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001945- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1946
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001947- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001948 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001949
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001950- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001951 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001952
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001953- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1954
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001955- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1956 on cygwin and mingw32.
1957
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001958- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1959
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001960- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1961 module.
1962
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001963- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1964 installation scheme for all platforms.
1965
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001966- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001967 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001968
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001969- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1970 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1971 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1972
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001973- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1974 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1975 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1976
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001977- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1978
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001979- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1980
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001981- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1982 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1983
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001984- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1985 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1986 type pattern with the same value exists.
1987
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001988- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1989 when run from the command prompt).
1990
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001991- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1992 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1993
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001994- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1995 default sort).
1996
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001997- Added global runctx function to profile module
1998
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001999- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2000
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002001- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2002
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002003- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2004
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002005- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002006 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2007 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2008 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2009 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2010 accordingly.
2011
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002012- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2013 decoding standards.
2014
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002015- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2016 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2017 called for all requests.
2018
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002019- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2020 they are passed to the compiler.
2021
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002022- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2023 indent, width and depth.
2024
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002025- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2026 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2027
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002028- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2029 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2030
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002031- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2032
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002033- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2034
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002035- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2036
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002037- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2038 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2039
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002040- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002041 for better performance.
2042
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002043- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002044
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002045- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2046 a string).
2047
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002048- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2049
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002050- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2051
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002052- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2053
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002054- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2055
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002056- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2057 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2058 list of fieldnames.
2059
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002060- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2061 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2062
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002063- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2064
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002065- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2066 empty lists.
2067
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002068- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2069 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2070 and shelves.
2071
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002072- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2073 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2074
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002075- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002076 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2077 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002078
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002079- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2080 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002081 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002082
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002083- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002084 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2085 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2086
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002087- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2088 and removed in Py2.4.
2089
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002090- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2091
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002092- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2093
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002094Tools/Demos
2095-----------
2096
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002097- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2098 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2099
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002100- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2101
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002102- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2103 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2104 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2105 destination in situations where both files are given.
2106
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002107- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2108 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2109 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2110 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2111
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002112- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2113
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002114- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2115 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2116 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2117 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2118 now.
2119
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002120- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2121 in effect
2122
2123- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2124 C-c C-h
2125
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002126- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2127 -d option was given.
2128
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002129Build
2130-----
2131
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002132- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2133 build under OS X.
2134
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002135- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2136 --enable-profiling.
2137
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002138- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2139 is configured --with-tsc.
2140
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002141- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2142 on AMD64.
2143
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002144- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2145 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2146
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002147- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2148 removed.
2149
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002150- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2151 supported (see PEP 11).
2152
2153- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2154
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002155- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2156
2157- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2158 (see PEP 11).
2159
2160- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2161 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2162
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002163C API
2164-----
2165
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002166- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2167 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2168 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2169
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002170- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2171 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2172 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2173 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2174
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002175- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2176 generator objects.
2177
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002178- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2179 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002180 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2181 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002182
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002183- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2184 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2185
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002186- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2187 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2188 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2189 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2190 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2191
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002192- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2193 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2194 about 10% faster.
2195
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002196- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2197 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2198
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002199- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2200 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2201 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2202 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2203
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002204Windows
2205-------
2206
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002207- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2208 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2209 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2210 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2211
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002212- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2213 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2214 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2215
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002216
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002217What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2218===============================
2219
2220*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2221
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002222IDLE
2223----
2224
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002225- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2226 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2227 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2228 context-menu actions.
2229
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002230- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2231 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2232 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2233 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2234 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2235 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2236 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2237 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2238 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2239
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002240
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002241What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2242=============================================
2243
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002244*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002245
2246Core and builtins
2247-----------------
2248
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002249- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002250 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002251 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2252
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002253Extension modules
2254-----------------
2255
2256- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2257 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2258 than once. This has been fixed.
2259
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002260- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2261 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2262 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2263 call.
2264
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002265- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2266
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002267Library
2268-------
2269
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002270- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2271 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2272
2273- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2274 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2275 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2276 restored.
2277
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002278IDLE
2279----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002280
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002281- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002282
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002283Build
2284-----
2285
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002286- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2287 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2288
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002289C API
2290-----
2291
2292Windows
2293-------
2294
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002295- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2296 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2297
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002298- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2299
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002300Mac
2301---
2302
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002303- Various fixes to pimp.
2304
2305- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2306
2307- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2308 more problems than it solves.
2309
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002310
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002311What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2312=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002313
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002314*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2315
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002316Core and builtins
2317-----------------
2318
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002319- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2320 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2321
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002322- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2323 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002324 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002325
2326- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2327 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2328 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002329 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002330
2331- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2332 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002333
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002334- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2335 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2336 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2337
2338- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002339 770247.
2340
2341- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002342
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002343Extension modules
2344-----------------
2345
2346- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2347 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2348
2349- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2350
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002351- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2352
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002353- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2354 contained within the _strptime module.
2355
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002356- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2357 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2358
2359- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002360 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2361
2362- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2363 the find_class attribute, if present.
2364
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002365- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002366
2367 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2368 (SF bug 763298).
2369
2370 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002371 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2372 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2373 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002374
2375 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2376
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002377Library
2378-------
2379
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002380- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2381
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002382- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2383 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2384 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2385 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2386 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2387 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2388 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2389 or Tester().
2390
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002391- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2392 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2393 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2394 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2395 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2396 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2397 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2398 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2399 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002400
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002401 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002402
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002403- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2404 weren't before was an oversight.
2405
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002406- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2407 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2408
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002409- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2410 when there are no lines.
2411
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002412- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2413 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2414
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002415- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2416 to child processes.
2417
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002418- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2419
2420- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2421
2422- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2423 xmlrpclib.
2424
2425- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2426 responses.
2427
2428- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2429 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2430
2431- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2432 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2433 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2434
2435- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2436 used as patterns.
2437
2438- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2439 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2440 than Tk 8.3.
2441
2442- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2443
2444- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002445
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002446Tools/Demos
2447-----------
2448
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002449- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2450
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002451- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2452
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002453- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002454
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002455Build
2456-----
2457
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002458- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2459
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002460- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2461
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002462- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2463 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002464
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002465- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2466 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2467 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002468
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002469C API
2470-----
2471
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002472- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2473 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2474
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002475Windows
2476-------
2477
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002478- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2479 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2480 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2481 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2482 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2483 Python exception ::
2484
2485 thread.error: can't start new thread
2486
2487 is raised now.
2488
2489- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2490 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2491 instead of from DLL teardown.
2492
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002493Mac
2494---
2495
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002496- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002497 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002498 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2499 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2500 the executable in the bundle.
2501
2502- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002503
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002504- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2505
2506- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2507 on Panther.
2508
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002509What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2510================================
2511
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002512*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002513
2514Core and builtins
2515-----------------
2516
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002517- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2518 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2519 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2520 with the -i option.
2521
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002522- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2523 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2524
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002525- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2526 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2527
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002528- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2529 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2530 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2531 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2532 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2533 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2534 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2535 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2536 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2537 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2538 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2539 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2540 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002541
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002542- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2543 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2544 embedded in a lambda expression.
2545
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002546- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2547 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2548 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2549 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2550 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2551
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002552- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2553 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2554 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2555
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002556- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2557 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2558
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002559- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2560 It's writable again.
2561
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002562- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2563 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2564 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002565 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002566
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002567- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2568 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2569 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2570
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002571Extension modules
2572-----------------
2573
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002574- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2575 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2576
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002577- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2578 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2579 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2580 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2581
2582- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2583 collection.
2584
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002585- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2586 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2587 unique within a single program run.
2588
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002589- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2590 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2591
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002592- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2593 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2594
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002595- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2596 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002597
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002598- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2599
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002600- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2601 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2602
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002603- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2604 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2605 for many BSD-derived systems.
2606
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002607
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002608Library
2609-------
2610
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002611- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2612 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2613 primary ones:
2614
2615 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2616 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2617 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2618
2619 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2620 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2621 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2622 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2623 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2624 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2625
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002626- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2627 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2628 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2629 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2630 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2631 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2632 argument.
2633
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002634- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2635 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2636 in the archive.
2637
2638- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2639 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2640
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002641- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2642 569574).
2643
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002644- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2645 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2646 no more.
2647
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002648- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2649 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2650 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2651 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2652 code coverage.
2653
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002654- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2655 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2656 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002657 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2658 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002659
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002660- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2661 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2662 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002663 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002664
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002665- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2666
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002667- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2668 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2669 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2670 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2671
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002672- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2673 handling.
2674
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002675- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2676 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2677
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002678- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2679 in socket.py.
2680
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002681- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2682
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002683- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2684 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2685 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2686 opener with proxy support.
2687
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002688- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2689
2690- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2691
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002692Tools/Demos
2693-----------
2694
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002695- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2696
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002697- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2698
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002699- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2700 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002701
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002702- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2703 files.
2704
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002705Build
2706-----
2707
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002708- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002709 different root directory.
2710
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002711C API
2712-----
2713
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002714- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2715 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2716 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2717 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2718 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2719 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2720 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2721 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2722 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2723 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2724
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002725- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2726 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2727 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2728 from Python.
2729
2730
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002731New platforms
2732-------------
2733
2734None this time.
2735
2736Tests
2737-----
2738
2739- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2740 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2741
2742Windows
2743-------
2744
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002745- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2746
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002747- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2748 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2749 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2750 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2751 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2752 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2753 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2754 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2755 that's what it's for.
2756
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002757Mac
2758---
2759
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002760- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2761 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2762 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2763 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002764- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2765 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2766- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002767
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002768SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2769------------------------------------
2770
2771430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2772598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2773622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2774661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2775683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2776697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2777713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2778724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2779727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2780729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2781730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2782731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2783732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2784733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2785735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2786740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2787744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2788745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2789747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2790749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2791751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2792753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2793755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2794757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2795760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2796
2797
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002798What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2799================================
2800
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002801*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002802
2803Core and builtins
2804-----------------
2805
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002806- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2807 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2808
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002809- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2810 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2811 and cannot be strings).
2812
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002813- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2814 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2815 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2816 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2817
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002818- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2819 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2820 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2821 Python itself.
2822
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002823- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2824 the referenced object, if it has one.
2825
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002826- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2827 the thread started at
2828 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2829
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002830- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2831 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2832 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2833 placed on a list index.
2834
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002835- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2836 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2837 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2838 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2839
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002840- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2841 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2842 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2843 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2844 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2845 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2846 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2847
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002848- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2849 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2850 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2851 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2852 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2853
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002854- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2855 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002856
2857- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2858 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2859 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2860 #693195.)
2861
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002862- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2863 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002864
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002865- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002866 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002867 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2868 interpreter executions, would fail.
2869
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002870- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002871 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002872 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002873
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002874Extension modules
2875-----------------
2876
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002877- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2878 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2879 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2880 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2881
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002882- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2883 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2884
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002885- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2886 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2887 and Greg Chapman.)
2888
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002889- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2890 recursively.
2891
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002892- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002893 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2894 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2895 leaks.
2896
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002897- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2898
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002899- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2900 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2901 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2902 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2903 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2904 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2905 #705836.
2906
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002907- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002908 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2909
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002910- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2911 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2912 See SF bug #692416.
2913
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002914- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2915 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2916
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002917- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2918 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2919 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002920
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002921- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002922 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2923 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2924
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002925- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2926 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2927 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2928 timeouts to work properly.
2929
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002930Library
2931-------
2932
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002933- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2934 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2935 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2936 future release.
2937
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002938- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2939 for querying platform dependent features.
2940
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002941- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002942
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002943- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2944 pickle protocol versions.
2945
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002946- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2947 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2948 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2949
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002950- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2951
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002952- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2953 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2954 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2955 modules.
2956
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002957- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2958 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2959 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2960
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002961- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2962 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2963
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002964- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2965 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2966 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2967
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002968- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002969 MS Office extensions.
2970
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002971- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2972 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2973
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002974- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2975 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2976
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002977- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2978 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2979 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2980 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2981 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2982 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2983
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002984- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2985 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2986 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002987
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002988- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2989 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2990 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2991
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002992- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2993
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002994- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2995 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2996 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2997
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002998Tools/Demos
2999-----------
3000
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003001- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3002 See the module docstring for details.
3003
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003004Build
3005-----
3006
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003007- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3008 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003009
3010C API
3011-----
3012
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003013- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3014
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003015- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3016 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3017 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3018
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003019- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3020 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003021
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003022 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3023 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3024 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003025
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003026- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003027 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3028
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003029- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3030 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3031 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003032
3033New platforms
3034-------------
3035
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003036None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003037
3038Tests
3039-----
3040
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003041- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3042 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003043
3044Windows
3045-------
3046
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003047- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3048 function.
3049
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003050- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3051 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003052
3053Mac
3054---
3055
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003056- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3057 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003058
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003059- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3060 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003061
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003062- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3063 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3064 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003065
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003066- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003067 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3068 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003069
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003070- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3071 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003072
3073
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003074What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3075=================================
3076
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003077*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003078
3079Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003080-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003081
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003082- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3083 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3084 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3085
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003086- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3087 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3088 (SF patch #664376.)
3089
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003090- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3091 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3092 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3093 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3094 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3095 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003096 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003097
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003098- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3099 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3100 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3101 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003102 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003103
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003104- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3105 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3106 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3107 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3108 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3109 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3110 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3111 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3112 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3113 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3114 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3115
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003116- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3117 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3118 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3119 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3120 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3121 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3122
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003123- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3124 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3125
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003126- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3127 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3128 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3129 case.)
3130
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003131- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3132 passed as unicode strings.
3133
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003134- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3135 See SF bug #683467.
3136
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003137- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3138 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3139
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003140- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3141
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003142- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3143
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003144- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3145 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3146 arguments.
3147
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003148- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3149 See SF bug #667147.
3150
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003151- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003152 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003153 See SF bug #676155.
3154
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003155- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003156 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003157 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3158 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3159 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3160 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3161 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3162 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003163
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003164Extension modules
3165-----------------
3166
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003167- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3168 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3169 tp_as_number pointer.
3170
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003171- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3172 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3173 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3174 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3175 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3176
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003177- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3178
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003179- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3180
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003181- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003182 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003183 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3184 patch #678531.)
3185
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003186- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3187 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3188
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003189- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3190 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3191
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003192- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3193
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003194- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3195 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3196 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3197
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003198- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3199
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003200- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3201 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3202
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003203- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003204
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003205- datetime changes:
3206
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003207 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3208
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003209 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3210 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3211 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3212 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3213 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3214 now.
3215
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003216 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003217 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3218 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003219
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003220 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003221 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003222 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3223 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3224 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3225 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003226
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003227 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3228 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3229 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003230 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3231
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003232 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3233 by a later example coded by Guido.
3234
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003235 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003236 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3237 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3238 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003239 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3240 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3241
3242 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3243 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3244 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3245 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3246 tzinfo subclass instance.
3247
3248 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3249 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3250 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3251 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3252 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3253 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3254 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3255 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003256
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003257 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3258 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3259 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3260 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3261 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003262 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3263
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003264 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003265
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003266 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3267 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3268 as a naive datetime object.
3269
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003270 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3271 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3272 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3273
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003274 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3275 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3276 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3277 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3278 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3279 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3280 comparison.
3281
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003282 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3283 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3284 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3285 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003286 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003287
3288 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003289
3290 and ::
3291
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003292 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3293
3294 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3295 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3296 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3297 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3298
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003299 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3300 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3301 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3302 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3303 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3304
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003305 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3306 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003307 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3308 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003309
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003310Library
3311-------
3312
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003313- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3314 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3315
3316- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3317 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3318 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3319 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3320 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3321 See PEP 307 for details.
3322
3323- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3324 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3325
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003326- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3327 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003328 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003329 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3330 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003331 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003332
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003333- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3334 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3335
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003336- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3337 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3338 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3339
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003340- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3341
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003342- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3343 exception.
3344
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003345- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3346 class.
3347
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003348- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3349 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3350 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3351
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003352- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3353 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3354
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003355- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003356 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3357 See SF bug #659228.
3358
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003359- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3360 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3361 See SF patch #651082.
3362
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003363- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003364
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003365- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3366 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3367
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003368- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003369 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003370
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003371- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3372 DOS paths from other platforms.
3373
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003374Tools/Demos
3375-----------
3376
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003377- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3378 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3379 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3380 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3381 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3382 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3383 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3384 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3385 example:
3386
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003387 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3388 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003389
3390 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3391
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003392
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003393Build
3394-----
3395
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003396- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3397 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3398 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003399 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3400
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003401 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3402
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003403- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3404 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3405 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3406 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3407 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3408 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3409 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3410 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3411 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3412
3413- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3414 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3415 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3416 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3417
3418- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3419 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3420
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003421C API
3422-----
3423
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003424- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3425 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003426
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003427- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3428 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3429 tp_as_number pointer.
3430
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003431- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3432 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3433 (SF #681367)
3434
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003435- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3436 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3437 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3438 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003439
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003440Tests
3441-----
3442
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003443- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003444 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3445 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3446 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3447 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3448 pydoc.)
3449
3450- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3451
3452- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003453
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003454Windows
3455-------
3456
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003457- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3458 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3459 time).
3460
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003461- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3462 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3463
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003464- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3465 release without strong cryptography.
3466
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003467- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003468 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003469
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003470- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3471 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3472
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003473Mac
3474---
3475
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003476- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3477 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003478
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003479- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3480 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3481 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003482
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003483- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3484 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003485
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003486- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3487 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3488 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3489 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003490
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003491- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003492 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3493 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3494 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003495
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003496
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003497What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003498=================================
3499
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003500*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003502Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003504
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003505- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3506
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003507- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3508 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003509 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003510 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003511 a different meaning than before.
3512
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003513- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003514 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003515 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003516
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003517- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003518 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003519 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003520
3521- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3522 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3523 and deallocation.
3524
3525- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3526 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3527
3528- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3529 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3530 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3531 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3532 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3533
3534- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3535 now detected by the garbage collector.
3536
3537- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3538 [SF bug 519621]
3539
3540- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3541 identifier.
3542
3543- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3544 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3545 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3546 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3547 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3548 [SF bug 563060]
3549
3550- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3551 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3552 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3553 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3554 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3555
3556- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3557 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3558 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3559
3560- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3561
3562- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3563 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3564 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3565 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3566 state of the slots would be lost.)
3567
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003568Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003570
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003571- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003572 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3573 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3574 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3575 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003576 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3577 Jython 2.1.
3578
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003579- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003580 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003581 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3582 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3583 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3584 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3585 these, see PEP 302.
3586
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003587- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3588 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3589 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3590
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003591- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3592 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3593 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3594
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003595- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3596 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3597 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3598
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003599- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3600 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3601 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3602 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3603 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3604 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3605 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3606 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3607 releases or implementations.
3608
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003609- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003610 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3611 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003612
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003613- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3614 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3615
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003616- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3617 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3618 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3619
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003620- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3621 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3622
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003623- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3624 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003625 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3626 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003627
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003628- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3629 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3630 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3631 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3632 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3633
3634 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3635 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3636 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3637 pattern.
3638
3639 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3640 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3641 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3642 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3643
3644 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3645 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3646 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3647 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3648 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3649 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3650
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003651- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3652 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3653 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3654 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3655 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3656 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3657 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3658 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003659
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003660- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3661 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3662 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3663 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3664 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003665 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3666 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3667 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3668 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3669 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3670 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3671 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003672
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003673- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3674 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3675
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003676- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3677 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3678 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3679 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3680 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3681 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3682 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3683 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3684 to Zack Weinberg!
3685
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003686- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3687 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3688 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3689 type. This has been fixed now.
3690
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003691- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3692 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3693 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3694
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003695- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3696 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3697 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3698 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3699 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3700 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3701 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3702 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003703 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003704
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003705- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3706 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3707 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003708
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003709- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3710 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3711 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3712 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3713 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3714 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3715 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3716 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003717 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003718 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3719 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3720
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003721- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3722 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3723 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3724 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3725 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3726 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3727 this.)
3728
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003729- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3730 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003731 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003732 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003733 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3734 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003735 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3736 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003737
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003738- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3739 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3740 currently running.
3741
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003742- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3743 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3744 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3745 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3746
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003747- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3748 as directory names.
3749
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003750- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3751 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3752
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003753- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3754 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3755
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003756- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003757 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3758 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003759
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003760- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3761 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3762 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3763 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3764 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3765
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003766- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3767 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3768 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3769 removed.
3770
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003771- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3772 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3773 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3774
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003775- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3776 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3777 to __debug__.
3778
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003779- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3780 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3781 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3782
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003783- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3784 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3785 deprecated now.
3786
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003787- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3788 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3789 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003790
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003791- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3792 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3793 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3794 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3795 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003796
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003797- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3798 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3799
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003800- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3801 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3802 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003803 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003804 is backward compatible.
3805
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003806- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3807 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3808 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3809 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3810 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3811
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003812- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3813 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3814 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3815 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3816 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3817 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003818
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003819- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3820 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3821
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003822- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3823 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3824
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003825- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3826 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3827 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3828 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3829 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3830
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003831- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3832 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3833 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3834
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003835- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003836 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3837
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003838- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3839 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3840 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003841
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003842- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3843 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3844
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003845- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3846 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3847 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3848
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003849- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3850
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003851Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003852-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003853
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003854- Added three operators to the operator module:
3855 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3856 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3857 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3858
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003859- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3860
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003861- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3862 archives.
3863
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003864- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3865 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3866 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3867
3868 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3869
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003870- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3871 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3872 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003873 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003874
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003875- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3876 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3877 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3878 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003879 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3880 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3881 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3882 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003883
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003884- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3885 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003886
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003887- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3888
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003889- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3890 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3891
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003892- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3893 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3894 supported.
3895
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003896- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3897
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003898- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3899 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003900
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003901- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3902 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3903
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003904- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3905
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003906- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3907 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3908
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003909- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3910 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3911 functions but callable type objects.
3912
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003913- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003914 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003915 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003916
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003917- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3918 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003919
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003920- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3921 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003922
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003923- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3924 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3925 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3926 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3927
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003928- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3929 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003930
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003931- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3932 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3933 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3934 and __imul__.
3935
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003936- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003937 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3938 is called.
3939
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003940- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3941 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3942 interpreter was compiled.
3943
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003944- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3945 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3946 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003947 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003948 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3949 1, not 2.
3950
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003951- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3952 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3953 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3954 limit.
3955
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003956- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3957 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3958 bug #623464.
3959
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003960- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3961 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3962 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3963 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3964
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003965Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003967
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003968- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3969
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003970- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3971 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3972 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3973 with Python 2.3a2.
3974
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003975- os.path exposes getctime.
3976
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003977- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003978 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003979 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003980 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003981 unit tests of floating point results.
3982
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003983- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3984 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3985 has been increased.
3986
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003987- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3988 executed.
3989
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003990- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3991 postinstallation script.
3992
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003993- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3994 test the current module.
3995
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003996- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003997 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3998 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3999 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4000 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4001
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004002- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004003 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004004 Ward's Optik package.
4005
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004006- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4007 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4008 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4009 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4010
4011- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4012 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004013 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004014
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004015- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4016 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4017 shelf are binary pickles.
4018
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004019- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4020 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4021
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004022- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4023 modules are iterators now.
4024
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004025- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4026 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4027 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4028 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4029 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4030 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004031
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004032- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4033 with their entity value.
4034
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004035- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4036
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004037- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4038 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004039
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004040- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4041 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004042 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004043
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004044- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4045 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4046 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4047 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4048 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4049 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4050 main():
4051
4052 import locale
4053 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4054
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004055- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4056 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4057
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004058- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4059 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4060 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4061 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4062 to the new standard.
4063
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004064- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4065 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4066 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4067 an extension to the database.
4068
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004069- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4070 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4071 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4072 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004073 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004074
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004075- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004076 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004077
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004078- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4079 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4080 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4081 bounded integers.
4082
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004083- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4084 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4085 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4086 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4087 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4088 in existence.
4089
4090 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4091 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4092 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4093 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4094 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4095 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4096
4097 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4098 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4099 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4100 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4101
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004102- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4103 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4104 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4105
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004106- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4107
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004108- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4109 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4110 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4111 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4112
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004113- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4114 argument.
4115
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004116- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4117 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4118 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4119 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4120 [SF patch 560794].
4121
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004122- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4123 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4124 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004125 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4126 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4127 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004128
4129- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4130 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004131
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004132- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4133 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4134 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4135 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004136
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004137- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4138 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4139 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4140 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4141 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4142
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004143- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004144
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004145- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4146
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004147- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4148 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4149 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4150 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4151 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4152 identical to None.
4153
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004154- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4155 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4156 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4157 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4158 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4159 results now.
4160
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004161- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4162 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4163
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004164- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4165 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4166 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4167 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4168 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4169 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4170 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4171 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4172
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004173- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4174
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004175- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4176 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4177
4178- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4179 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4180 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4181 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4182 and other systems.
4183
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004184- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4185 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4186 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4187 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 +00004188 work well with these.
4189
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004190- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4191
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004192- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004193 connections.
4194
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004195- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4196 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4197 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4198
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004199- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4200 sets
4201
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004202- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4203 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4204 name.
4205
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004206- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4207 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4208 passed in.
4209
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004210- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004211 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004212 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4213 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004214
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004215- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4216
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004217- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4218
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004219- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4220 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4221 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4222
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004223- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4224 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4225 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4226 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004227 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004228
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004229- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004230 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004231 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004232
4233- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4234 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4235 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4236
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004237- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004238 the value of its expression argument.
4239
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004240- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4241 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4242 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4243
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004244- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4245 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4246 skipstone browser was included.
4247
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004248- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4249 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4250
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004251Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004253
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004254- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4255 names in addition to accepting file names.
4256
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004257- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4258 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4259 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4260 still used and useful.)
4261
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004262- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4263 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4264 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4265 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004266
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004267- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4268 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4269 the generated binary.
4270
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004271Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004272-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004273
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004274- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4275
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004276- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4277 except in the hands of experts.
4278
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004279- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004280 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4281 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4282 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004283
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004284- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4285 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4286 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4287 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4288 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4289 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4290 builds.
4291
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004292- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4293 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4294 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4295 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4296 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4297 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4298 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4299 new type.
4300
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004301- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004302
4303 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4304 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4305 positive infinities.
4306
4307 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4308 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4309 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4310 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4311 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4312 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4313 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4314
4315 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4316
4317 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4318
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004319- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4320 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4321 size of the executable.
4322
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004323- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4324 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4325 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4326 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004327
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004328- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4329
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004330- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4331 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4332 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004333
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004334- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4335 well as Unix.
4336
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004337- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4338 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4339 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4340 modules in the README file for details.
4341
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004342C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004344
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004345- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4346 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004347 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004348 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004349 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004350
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004351- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4352 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4353 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4354 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4355 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4356 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004357 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004358 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4359 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4360 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4361 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4362 aligned.)
4363
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004364- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4365 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4366 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4367
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004368- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4369 level.
4370
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004371- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4372 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4373 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4374 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4375 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4376
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004377- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4378 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4379 code.
4380
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004381- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4382 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4383 adjusting for negative indices.
4384
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004385- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4386 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4387 object.
4388
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004389- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4390 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4391 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4392
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004393- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4394 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004395
4396- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4397
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004398- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4399 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4400 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4401 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4402
4403- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4404
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004405- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004406
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004407- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004408 without going through the buffer API.
4409
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004411
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004412- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4413 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4414 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4415 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4416
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004417- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4418 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4419
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004420- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004421 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4422
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004423New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004425
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004426- OpenVMS is now supported.
4427
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004428- AtheOS is now supported.
4429
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004430- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4431
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004432- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4433
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004434Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-----
4436
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004437- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4438 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4439 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004440
4441Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004443
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004444- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4445 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4446 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4447 bugs.
4448 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004449 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004450 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4451 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004452 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004453
4454- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004455 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004456
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004457- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4458 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4459
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004460- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4461 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004462 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004463 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4464
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004465- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4466 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4467 use files" uninstall option).
4468
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004469- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4470
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004471- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4472 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4473
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004474- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4475 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4476 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4477
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004478- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4479 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4480 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4481 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4482 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004483 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4484 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4485 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004486
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004487- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004488 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004489 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4490 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4491 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4492 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4493 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4494 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4495 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4496 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4497 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4498 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4499 work around.
4500
4501- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4502 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4503 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4504 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4505 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4506 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4507 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4508 specified with O_CREAT too).
4509
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004510Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511----
4512
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004513- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004514
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004515- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4516 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4517 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4518
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004519- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4520 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4521 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4522
4523- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4524 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4525 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4526 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4527 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4528 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4529 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4530 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004531
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004532- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4533 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4534 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004535
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004536- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4537 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4538 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4539 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4540 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004541
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004542- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4543 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4544 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004545
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004546- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4547 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004548
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004549- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4550 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4551 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4552 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4553 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004554
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004555- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4556 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4557 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4558
4559- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4560 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4561 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004562
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004563- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4564 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4565 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4566 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004567 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004568
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004569- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4570 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004571
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004572- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4573 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004574
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004575- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004576 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004577 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4578 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004579
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004580
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004581What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004582===============================
4583
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4585
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004586Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004588
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004589- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4590 with a custom metaclass.
4591
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004592Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004594
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004595- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4596 are proxies.
4597
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004598Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004600
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004601- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4602 very short strings.
4603
4604- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4605 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4606 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4607 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4608 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4609
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004610Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004612
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004613- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4614 close or delete time).
4615
4616- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4617 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4618
4619- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4620
4621- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004622 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004623
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004624Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004626
4627Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004629
4630C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004632
4633New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004635
4636Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004637-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004638
4639Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004641
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004642- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4643
4644- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4645 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4646
4647- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4648 deleted at process exit time.
4649
4650- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4651 in backslash.
4652
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004653Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004655
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004656- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4657 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4658 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4659
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004660
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004661What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004662===========================
4663
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4665
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004666Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004668
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004669- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4670 been extensively updated. See
4671
4672 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4673
4674 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4675
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004676- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4677 deleted!
4678
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004679- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4680 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4681 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4682 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4683 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4684
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004685- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4686
4687 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4688 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4689
4690 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4691 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4692 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4693 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4694 supported anyway.
4695
4696 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4697 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4698
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004699- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4700 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4701 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4702 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4703 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004704
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004705- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4706 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4707 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4708
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004709Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004711
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004712- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4713 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4714 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4715 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4716 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4717 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004718 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4719 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4720 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4721 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004722
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004723- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4724 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4725 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4726
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004727Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004729
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004730- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4731
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004732Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004734
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004735- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4736 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4737 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4738 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4739 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4740 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4741
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004742- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4743
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004744- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4745
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004746- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4747
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004748- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4749 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4750 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4751
4752- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4753
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004754Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004756
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004757- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4758 off a search on Google.
4759
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004760Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004762
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004763- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4764 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4765 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4766 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4767 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4768 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4769 other platforms should do likewise.
4770
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004771- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4772 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4773 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4774
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004775C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004777
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004778- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4779 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4780 producing key-value pairs.
4781
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004782- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004783 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004784 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4785 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4786 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4787 previously went unchallenged.
4788
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004789New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004791
4792Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004793-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004794
4795Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004796-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004797
4798Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004800
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004801- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4802 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004803
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004804- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4805 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4806 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4807 home.
4808
4809
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004810What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004811===========================
4812
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4814
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004815Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004817
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004818- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4819 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004820
4821 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004822 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004823
4824 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4825 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004826 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004827 This needs to be documented.
4828
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004829- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4830 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4831
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004832- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4833 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4834 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4835
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004836- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4837 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4838
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004839- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4840 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4841 class forbids it).
4842
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004843- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4844 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4845 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4846
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004847- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4848
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004849Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004850-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004851
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004852- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4853 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004854 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004855
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004856- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4857 (like 1 + '').
4858
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004859Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004861
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004862- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4863 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4864 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4865 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004866 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004867 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4868
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004869- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4870 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4871 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4872 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4873
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004874- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4875 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004876 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4877 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4878 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004879
4880- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4881 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004882
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004883- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4884 bytes on its input.
4885
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004886Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004888
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004889- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004890 convenience function.
4891
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004892- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4893 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4894 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004895 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4896 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4897 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4898 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4899 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4900 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004901
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004902- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4903 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4904 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4905 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4906
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004907- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4908 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4909 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4910
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004911- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4912 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4913 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4914 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4915
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004916- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4917 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004919 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4920 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4921 new -l and -e options.
4922
4923- statcache is now deprecated.
4924
4925- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4926 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004928 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4929 time properly taken into account.
4930
4931- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4932 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4933 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4934 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4935
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004936Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004938
4939Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004941
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004942- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4943 is built with libdb3 if available.
4944
4945- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4946
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004947C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004949
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004950- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4951 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4952 PySequence_Size().
4953
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004954- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4955
4956- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4957 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4958 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4959
4960- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4961 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4962
4963- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4964 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4965
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004966New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004968
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004969- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4970 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4971
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004972- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4973 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4974
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004975- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4976
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004977Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004978-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004979
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004980- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4981 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4982
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004983Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004984-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004985
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004986Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004987----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004988
4989- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4990 removed completely in the next release.
4991
4992- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4993 OSX.
4994
4995- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4996 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4997
4998- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4999
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005000
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005001What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005002===========================
5003
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005004*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5005
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005006Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005008
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005009- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005010 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005011 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005012 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5013 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005014 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5015 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005016 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5017 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005018
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005019- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5020 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5021
5022- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5023 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5024
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005025Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005026-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005027
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005028- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5029 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5030 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5031 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5032 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5033 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5034 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5035 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5036
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005037- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5038 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5039 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5040 example).
5041
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005042- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005043 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005044 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005045 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005046
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005047- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5048 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5049 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005050 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005051
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005052- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5053 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5054 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5055 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5056 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5057 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5058
5059 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5060
5061 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5062
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005063Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005065
5066- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5067
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005068- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5069
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005070- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5071 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005072
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005073- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5074 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5075 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5076 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5077 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5078 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005079 attributes.
5080
5081- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5082 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5083 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005084
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005085- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5086 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5087 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005088
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005089- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5090 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5091 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005092 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5093 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5094
5095- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5096 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005097
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005098Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005100
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005101- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5102 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5103
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005104- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5105 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5106 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5107 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5108
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005109- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5110 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5111 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5112 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5113
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005114 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5115 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5116 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5117 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5118 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5119 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5120 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5121 without losing information).
5122
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005123- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005124 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5125 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5126 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5127 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5128 module).
5129
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005130 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005131 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5132 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5133 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5134 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005135
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005136- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005137 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5138 encoding.
5139
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005140- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5141 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5142
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005144 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5145
5146- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5147 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5148 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5149 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5150
5151- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5152
5153- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5154 ON, and OFF.
5155
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005156- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5157 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5158
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005159Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005161
5162- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5163 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5164 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005165
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005166- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5167 been added: -X and -E.
5168
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005169Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005171
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005172- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5173 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5174
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005175C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005176-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005177
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005178- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5179 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5180 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5181 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5182 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5183
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005184- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5185 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5186 as long) arguments.
5187
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005188- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5189 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5190 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5191 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5192 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5193 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5194
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005195- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5196 input.
5197
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005198New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005200
5201Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005203
5204Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005206
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005207- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5208 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5209 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5210
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005211- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5212 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5213 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005214 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5217 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5218 import signal
5219 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005220
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005221 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005222 while 1:
5223 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005225 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5226 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5227 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5228 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005229
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005230
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005231What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5232===========================
5233
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5235
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005236Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005237--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005238
5239- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5240 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5241 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5242
5243- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5244 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5245 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5246 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5247 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5248 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5249 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005250
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005251- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005252 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005253 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5254 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5255 associate a docstring with a property.
5256
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005257- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5258 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5259 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5260 other built-in object types.
5261
5262- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5263 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5264 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5265 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5266 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5267
5268- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5269 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5270
5271- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5272 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005273 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005274 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5275 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5276 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5277 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5278 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5279
5280- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5281 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5282 class.
5283
5284- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5285 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5286 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5287 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5288
5289- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5290 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5291 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5292 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5293
5294- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5295 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5296
5297- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5298 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5299 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5300 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5301 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005302 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005303 with the same value as s.
5304
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005305- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5306
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005307Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005308----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005309
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005310- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5311
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005312- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5313 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5314 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5315 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5316 objects.
5317
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005318- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5319 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005320 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5321 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5322
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005323- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5324 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5325 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5326
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005327Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005328-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005329
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005330- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5331 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5332 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5333 by the instances.
5334
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005335- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5336 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5337 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5338
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005339- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5340 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5341 before the entire comparison is complete.
5342
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005343- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5344 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5345 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5346
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005347- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5348 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5349 getwriter().
5350
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005351- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5352 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5353
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005354- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005355 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5356 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5357
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005358- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5359 iterable object.
5360
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005361- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5362 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005363
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005364- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5365 authentication.
5366
5367- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5368 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005369
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005370- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005371 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5372 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5373 a sample driver.)
5374
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005375Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005376-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005377
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005378- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5379 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5380 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5381 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5382 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5383 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5384 kernel has large file support.
5385
5386- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5387 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5388 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5389 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5390 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5391
5392- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5393 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5394 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5395
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005396C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005397-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005398
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005399- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5400 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5401
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005402New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005403-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005404
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005405- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5406 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5407
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005408Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005409-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005410
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005411- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5412 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5413 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5414 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5415 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5416
5417- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5418 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5419 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5420 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5421
5422- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5423 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5424
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005425Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005426-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005427
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005428- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005429 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5430 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005431
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005432
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005433What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5434===========================
5435
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005436*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5437
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005438Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005439----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005440
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005441- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5442 big to represent as a C double.
5443
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005444- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5445 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5446 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5447 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5448 restriction).
5449
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005450- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5451 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5452 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5453 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5454 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5455
5456 >>> dir([])
5457 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5458 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5459 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5460 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5461 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5462 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5463 'reverse', 'sort']
5464
5465 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5466
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005467- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005468 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5469 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5470 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5471 OverflowError exception.
5472
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005473- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005474 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005475 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5476 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5477 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5478 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5479 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005480 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005481 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5482 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5483
5484 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5485 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5486 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5487 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005488
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005489- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005490 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5491 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5492 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5493 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5494 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5495 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5496 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5497 once it is created.
5498
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005499- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5500 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5501 (key, value) pairs.
5502
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005503- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005504 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5505 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5506
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005507- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5508 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5509 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5510 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5511 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005512
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005513- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005514 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5515 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5516
5517 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5518
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005519- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005520 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5521
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005522Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005523-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005524
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005525- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005526 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5527 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005528
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005529- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5530 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5531 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5532 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5533 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5534 in this area anymore).
5535
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005536- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5537 threading.Timer.
5538
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005539- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5540 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5541
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005542- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005543 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5544
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005545- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005546 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5547 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5548 converted to Python longs.
5549
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005550- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005551 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5552
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005553- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5554 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5555 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5556
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005557Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005558-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005559
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005560- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5561 division operators as per PEP 238.
5562
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005563Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005564-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005565
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005566- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5567 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5568 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5569 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5570
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005571C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005572-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005573
5574- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005575
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005576- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5577 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005578 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005579
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005580 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5581 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005582 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005584
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005585- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005586 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5587 module:
5588
5589 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005590
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005591 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5592 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005593
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005594 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5595 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005596
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005597 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5598
5599 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5600
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005601- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005602 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5603 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5604 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005605
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005606New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005607-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005608
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005609- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5610 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5611 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5612 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5613 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005614
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005615Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005616-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005617
5618Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005619-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005620
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005621- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5622 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5623 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5624 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005625 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5626 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5627 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5628 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5629 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005630
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005631- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005632 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5633
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005634
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005635What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5636===========================
5637
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005638*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5639
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005640Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005641-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005642
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005643- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5644 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5645
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005646- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5647 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5648 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005649
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005650- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5651 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5652 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5653 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005654
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005655- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5656
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005657- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005658
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005659Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005660-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005661
5662- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005663 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005664 the module docstring for details.
5665
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005666Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005668
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005669- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005670 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5671 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5672 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005673
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005674- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5675 Nick Mathewson.
5676
5677Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005679
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005680- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5681 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5682 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5683 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5684 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5685 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5686 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5687 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5688
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005689- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5690 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5691 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5692 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5693
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005694- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5695 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5696 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5697 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5698 come a long way).
5699
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005700- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5701 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5702 write filters for these warnings).
5703
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005704- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5705 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5706 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5707 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5708 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5709
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005710- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5711 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5712 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5713 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5714 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5715 older distribution.
5716
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005717Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005718-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005719
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005720- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5721 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005722 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005723
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005724- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5725 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5726 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5727
5728- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5729
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005730- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5731
5732- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5733
5734- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5735
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005736- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005737
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005738- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5739
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005740New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005741-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005742
5743C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005744-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005745
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005746- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5747 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5748 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5749 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5750 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5751 against buffer overruns.
5752
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005753- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005754 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5755 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005756 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5757 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5758 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5759
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005760- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5761 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5762 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5763 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5764 deprecated.
5765
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005766Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005767-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005768
5769- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5770 relevant is found.
5771
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005772
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005773What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005774===========================
5775
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005776*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5777
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005778Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005779----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005780
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005781- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5782 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5783 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5784 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5785 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5786 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5787 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5788 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005789 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005790 repaired.
5791
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005792- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005793 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005794 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5795 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5796 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5797 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5798 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5799 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5800 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5801 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5802
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005803- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5804 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5805 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5806 leading BMO character).
5807
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005808- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5809 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5810 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5811
5812 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5813 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5814 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005815
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005816 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5817 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5818 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5819 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5820 for various simple to use conversions.
5821
5822 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5823 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5824
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005825 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5826 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5827 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5828 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5829 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5830 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5831 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5832 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5833 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5834 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5835 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5836 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5837 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5838 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5839 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005840
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005841- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5842 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5843 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005844 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005845 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005846
5847 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005848 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5849 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5850 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5851 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5852 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005853 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5854 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005855
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005856 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5857 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5858 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005859 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005860
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005861- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5862 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5863 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5864 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5865 floating arithmetic,
5866
5867 x = 9007199254740992.0
5868 print long(x)
5869
5870 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5871 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5872 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5873 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5874 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5875 functions are of good quality).
5876
5877 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5878 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5879 algorithms to break.
5880
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005881- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5882 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5883 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5884 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5885 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5886 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5887 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5888 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5889 order.
5890
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005891- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5892 operation along the most common code paths.
5893
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005894- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5895 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5896
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005897- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5898 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5899 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5900 {}.update(UserDict())
5901
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005902- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5903 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5904 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5905 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5906 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5907 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5908 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5909 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5910
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005911- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005912 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005913
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005914 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005915 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5916 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005917 join() method of strings
5918 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005919 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5920 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005921 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005922 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005923
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005924- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5925 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5926
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005927- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5928 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5929
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005930- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5931 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5932 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5933 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5934
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005935- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5936 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005937 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005938 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5939 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005940
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005941- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5942
5943
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005944Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005945-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005946
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005947- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005948 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005949 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5950 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5951
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005952- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5953 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5954
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005955- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5956 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5957 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5958 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5959
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005960- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5961 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5962 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5963
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005964- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5965
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005966- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5967
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005968- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5969 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5970 that are still imported into string.py).
5971
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005972- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5973
5974- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5975 Now it does.
5976
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005977- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5978
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005979- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5980 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5981 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5982 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5983 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005984 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5985 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005986
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005987- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5988 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5989 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5990 'help(object)'.
5991
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005992Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005993-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005994
5995- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005996 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005997 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5998 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5999
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006000- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006001 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6002 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006003
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006004C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006005-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006006
6007- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6008 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006009
6010----
6011
6012**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**