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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000015- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
16 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
17 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
18 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
19 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
20
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000021- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
22
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000023- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
24 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
25
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000026- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
27 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
28 modified the list.
29
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000030- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
31 functions is now writable.
32
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000033- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
34 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
35 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
36 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
37
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000038- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
39 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
40 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
41 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
42 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000043
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000044- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
45 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
46
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000047Extension modules
48-----------------
49
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +000050- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
51 data.
52
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000053- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
54 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
55 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
56 supposed to have been truncated away.
57
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000058- Added socket.socketpair().
59
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +000060- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
61 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
62
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000063Library
64-------
65
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +000066- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
67 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +000068
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +000069- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
70 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
71
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000072- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
73
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000074- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
75
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000076- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
77
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000078- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
79 Percivall.
80
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000081- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
82 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
83
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000084- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
85 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
86 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000087 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000088
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000089- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
90 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
91 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
92 and exponent.
93
94- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
95
96- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
97 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
98 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
99
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000100- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
101 to the readline module.
102
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000103- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000104 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
105 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000106
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000107- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
108 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
109 contains symlinks.
110
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000111- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
112 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
113
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000114- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
115 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
116 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
117
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000118- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
119 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
120 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
121 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
122 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
123 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
124 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
125 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
126 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
127 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
128 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
129 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
130 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
131
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000132- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
133
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000134Tools/Demos
135-----------
136
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000137- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
138 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
139
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000140- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
141
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000142Build
143-----
144
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000145- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
146 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
147
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000148- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
149 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
150
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000151- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
152 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
153
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000154- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
155 GNU/k*BSD systems.
156
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000157- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
158 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
159
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000160C API
161-----
162
163Documentation
164-------------
165
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000166- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
167 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
168
169- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
170 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
171 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000172
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000173New platforms
174-------------
175
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000176- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
177
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000178Tests
179-----
180
181Windows
182-------
183
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000184- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
185 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
186 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
187 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
188 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
189 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
190 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
191 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
192 the problem.
193
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000194Mac
195---
196
197
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000198What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
199=================================
200
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000201*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000202
203Core and builtins
204-----------------
205
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000206- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
207 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
208 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
209 sensitive code.
210
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000211- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
212 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
213 @staticmethod
214 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000215 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000216
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000217- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
218 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
219 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
220 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
221 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
222 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
223 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
224 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
225 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
226 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
227 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
228
229 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
230 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
231 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
232 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
233 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
234 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
235 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
236
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000237- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
238 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
239
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000240- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000241 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000242
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000243- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000244 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000245 which was missing for no apparent reason.
246
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000247- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000248 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
249 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
250
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000251- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
252 types that support garbage collection.
253
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000254- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
255
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000256- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
257 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
258 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
259 Jython.
260
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000261- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
262
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000263- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
264 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
265
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000266- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
267 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
268 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000269
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000270- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
271 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
272 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
273
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000274Extension modules
275-----------------
276
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000277- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
278
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000279Library
280-------
281
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000282- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
283 TIS-620
284
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000285- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
286 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
287 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
288 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
289 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
290 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
291 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
292 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
293 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
294 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
295
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000296- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
297
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000298- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
299 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
300 same as when the argument is omitted).
301 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
302
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000303- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
304
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000305- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
306 schemes are offered.
307
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000308- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
309
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000310- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
311 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
312 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
313
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000314- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
315
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000316- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
317 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
318
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000319- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
320 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
321 when dummy_threading is being used.
322
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000323- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
324 from a tarfile.
325
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000326- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000327 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000328
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000329- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
330 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
331 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
332 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
333
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000334- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
335 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
336
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000337- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
338 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
339 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
340 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
341 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
342 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
343 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
344 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
345 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
346 by some other method in progress).
347
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000348- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
349 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
350 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000351
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000352- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
353
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000354- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
355 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
356 AM Kuchling.
357
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000358- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
359 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
360 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
361
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000362- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
363 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
364 instead of unsigned.
365
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000366- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000367 no longer part of the public API.
368
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000369- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
370 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
371 string methods of the same name).
372
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000373- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000374 SF patch 945642.
375
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000376- doctest unittest integration improvements:
377
378 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
379
380 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
381 DocTestSuites.
382
383- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
384 that provide thread-local data.
385
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000386- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
387 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
388
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000389- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
390
391- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
392 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
393 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
394
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000395- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
396
397 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
398 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
399 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000400
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000401 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
402 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
403 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
404 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
405
406 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
407 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
408
409 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
410 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
411 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
412 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
413
414 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
415 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
416 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
417 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
418 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
419
420 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
421 wrapping help output.
422
423 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
424 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
425 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000426
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000427C API
428-----
429
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000430- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
431 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
432 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
433 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
434 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
435 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
436 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
437 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
438 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
439 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
440 its visible semantics have not changed.
441
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000442- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
443 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
444
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000445Documentation
446-------------
447
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000448- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000449
450 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000451 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000452
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000453 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000454
455 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
456
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000457- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000458
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000459Tests
460-----
461
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000462- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000463 platforms that use the Makefile.
464
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000465- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
466 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
467 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
468
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000469
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000470What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
471=================================
472
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000473*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000474
475Core and builtins
476-----------------
477
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000478- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
479 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
480 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
481 objects now (one object instead of three).
482
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000483- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
484 Windows DLLs.
485
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000486- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
487 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000488
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000489- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
490 a new .pyc magic.
491
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000492- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
493 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
494 be there.
495
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000496- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
497 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
498 the LC_NUMERIC category.
499
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000500- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
501 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
502 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
503
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000504- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
505
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000506- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
507 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
508 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000509
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000510- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
511 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
512
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000513- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
514
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000515- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000516 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000517
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000518- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
519
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000520- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
521
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000522- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
523 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
524
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000525- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
526 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
527 Fixes bug #858016 .
528
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000529- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
530 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
531 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
532
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000533- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
534 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
535 improves their performance (about 35%).
536
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000537- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
538 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
539 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
540
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000541- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
542 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
543 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
544 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
545
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000546- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
547 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
548 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
549 length is not known).
550
551- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
552 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000553 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
554 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000555 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
556
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000557- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
558 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
559
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000560- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
561 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
562 keyword arguments.
563
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000564- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
565 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
566 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
567
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000568- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
569 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
570 cases.
571
572- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
573 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
574 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
575 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
576 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
577 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
578 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
579 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
580 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
581 a release build.
582
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000583- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
584 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
585
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000586- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000587 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000588
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000589- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
590 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
591 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
592 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
593 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
594 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
595 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
596 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
597 destroyed.
598
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000599- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
600 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
601 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
602 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
603 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
604 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
605 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
606 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
607
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000608- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
609 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
610 character other than a space.
611
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000612- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
613 by the function object or by the method object, the function
614 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
615 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
616 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
617 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
618 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
619 attributes with the same name.
620
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000621- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
622 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
623 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
624 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
625 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
626 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
627 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
628 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
629 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
630 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
631 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
632 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
633 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
634 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000635
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000636- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
637 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
638 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
639 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
640 This has been repaired.
641
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000642- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
643
644- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
645
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000646- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
647 over a sequence.
648
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000649- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000650 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000651
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000652- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
653
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000654- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
655 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
656 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
657 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
658 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
659 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
660 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
661 records with equal keys is unchanged).
662
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000663- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
664 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
665 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
666
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000667- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
668 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
669 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
670 freelist.
671
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000672- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
673 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
674
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000675- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
676 number.
677
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000678- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
679 a TypeError exception.
680
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000681- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
682 820195.
683
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000684- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
685 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
686 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
687
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000688- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000689 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
690 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000691
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000692- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
693 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
694 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
695
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000696- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
697 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000698 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000699
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000700- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000701 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
702 the first call.
703
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000704
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000705Extension modules
706-----------------
707
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000708- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
709 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
710
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000711- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
712 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
713 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
714 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
715 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
716 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
717 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000718
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000719- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
720
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000721- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
722
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000723- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
724 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
725
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000726- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
727 fewer false positives.
728
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000729- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
730 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
731
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000732- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000733 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
734
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000735- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000736 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000737 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000738 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
739 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000740
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000741- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
742 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
743 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
744 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
745
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000746- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
747 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
748 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
749 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
750 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
751 #897625.
752
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000753- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
754 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
755
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000756- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
757 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
758 and pops on either side of the deque.
759
760- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
761 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
762
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000763- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
764 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
765 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
766 other functions that expect a function argument.
767
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000768- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
769
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000770- os.getsid was added.
771
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000772- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
773 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
774 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
775
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000776- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
777
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000778- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
779
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000780- readline.clear_history was added.
781
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000782- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
783
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000784- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
785
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000786- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
787
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000788- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
789
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000790- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
791
792- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
793
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000794- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
795
796- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
797
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000798- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
799 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
800 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
801
802- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
803 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
804 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
805 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
806 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
807 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
808 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
809
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000810- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
811 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
812 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
813 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000814
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000815- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000816 iterators from a single iterable.
817
818- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
819 of raising a TypeError exception.
820
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000821- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
822 as parameter.
823
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000824Library
825-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000826
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000827- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
828 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
829 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000830
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000831- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
832 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
833 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000834
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000835- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000836
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000837- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
838 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000839
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000840- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
841 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
842
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000843- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
844
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000845- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000846 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000847
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000848- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
849 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
850
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000851- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
852
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000853- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
854 on cygwin and mingw32.
855
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000856- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
857
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000858- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
859 module.
860
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000861- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
862 installation scheme for all platforms.
863
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000864- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000865 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000866
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000867- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
868 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
869 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
870
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000871- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
872 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
873 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
874
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000875- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
876
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000877- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
878
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000879- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
880 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
881
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000882- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
883 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
884 type pattern with the same value exists.
885
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000886- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
887 when run from the command prompt).
888
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000889- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
890 not taken into consideration when caching value.
891
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000892- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
893 default sort).
894
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000895- Added global runctx function to profile module
896
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000897- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
898
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000899- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
900
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000901- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
902
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000903- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000904 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
905 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
906 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
907 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
908 accordingly.
909
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000910- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
911 decoding standards.
912
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000913- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
914 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
915 called for all requests.
916
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000917- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
918 they are passed to the compiler.
919
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000920- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
921 indent, width and depth.
922
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000923- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
924 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
925
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000926- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
927 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
928
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000929- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
930
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000931- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
932
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000933- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
934
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000935- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
936 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
937
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000938- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000939 for better performance.
940
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000941- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000942
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000943- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
944 a string).
945
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000946- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
947
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000948- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
949
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000950- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
951
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000952- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
953
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000954- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
955 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
956 list of fieldnames.
957
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000958- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
959 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
960
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000961- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
962
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000963- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
964 empty lists.
965
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000966- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
967 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
968 and shelves.
969
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000970- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
971 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
972
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000973- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000974 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
975 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000976
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000977- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
978 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000979 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000980
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000981- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000982 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
983 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
984
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000985- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
986 and removed in Py2.4.
987
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000988- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
989
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000990- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
991
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000992Tools/Demos
993-----------
994
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000995- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
996 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
997
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000998- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
999
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001000- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1001 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1002 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1003 destination in situations where both files are given.
1004
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001005- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1006 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1007 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1008 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1009
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001010- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1011
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001012- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1013 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1014 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1015 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1016 now.
1017
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001018- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1019 in effect
1020
1021- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1022 C-c C-h
1023
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001024- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1025 -d option was given.
1026
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001027Build
1028-----
1029
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001030- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1031 build under OS X.
1032
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001033- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1034 --enable-profiling.
1035
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001036- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1037 is configured --with-tsc.
1038
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001039- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1040 on AMD64.
1041
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001042- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1043 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1044
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001045- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1046 removed.
1047
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001048- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1049 supported (see PEP 11).
1050
1051- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1052
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001053- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1054
1055- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1056 (see PEP 11).
1057
1058- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1059 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1060
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001061C API
1062-----
1063
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001064- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1065 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1066 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1067
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001068- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1069 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1070 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1071 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1072
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001073- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1074 generator objects.
1075
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001076- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1077 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001078 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1079 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001080
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001081- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1082 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1083
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001084- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1085 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1086 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1087 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1088 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1089
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001090- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1091 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1092 about 10% faster.
1093
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001094- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1095 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1096
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001097- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1098 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1099 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1100 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1101
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001102Windows
1103-------
1104
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001105- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1106 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1107 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1108 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1109
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001110- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1111 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1112 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1113
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001114
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001115What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1116===============================
1117
1118*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1119
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001120IDLE
1121----
1122
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001123- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1124 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1125 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1126 context-menu actions.
1127
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001128- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1129 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1130 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1131 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1132 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1133 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1134 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1135 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1136 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1137
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001138
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001139What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1140=============================================
1141
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001142*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001143
1144Core and builtins
1145-----------------
1146
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001147- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001148 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001149 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1150
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001151Extension modules
1152-----------------
1153
1154- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1155 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1156 than once. This has been fixed.
1157
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001158- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1159 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1160 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1161 call.
1162
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001163- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1164
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001165Library
1166-------
1167
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001168- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1169 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1170
1171- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1172 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1173 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1174 restored.
1175
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001176IDLE
1177----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001178
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001179- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001180
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001181Build
1182-----
1183
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001184- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1185 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1186
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001187C API
1188-----
1189
1190Windows
1191-------
1192
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001193- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1194 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1195
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001196- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1197
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001198Mac
1199---
1200
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001201- Various fixes to pimp.
1202
1203- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1204
1205- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1206 more problems than it solves.
1207
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001208
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001209What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1210=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001211
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001212*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1213
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001214Core and builtins
1215-----------------
1216
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001217- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1218 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1219
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001220- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1221 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001222 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001223
1224- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1225 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1226 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001227 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001228
1229- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1230 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001231
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001232- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1233 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1234 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1235
1236- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001237 770247.
1238
1239- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001240
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001241Extension modules
1242-----------------
1243
1244- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1245 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1246
1247- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1248
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001249- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1250
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001251- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1252 contained within the _strptime module.
1253
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001254- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1255 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1256
1257- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001258 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1259
1260- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1261 the find_class attribute, if present.
1262
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001263- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001264
1265 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1266 (SF bug 763298).
1267
1268 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001269 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1270 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1271 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001272
1273 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1274
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001275Library
1276-------
1277
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001278- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1279
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001280- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1281 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1282 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1283 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1284 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1285 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1286 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1287 or Tester().
1288
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001289- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1290 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1291 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1292 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1293 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1294 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1295 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1296 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1297 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001298
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001299 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001300
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001301- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1302 weren't before was an oversight.
1303
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001304- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1305 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1306
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001307- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1308 when there are no lines.
1309
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001310- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1311 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1312
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001313- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1314 to child processes.
1315
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001316- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1317
1318- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1319
1320- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1321 xmlrpclib.
1322
1323- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1324 responses.
1325
1326- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1327 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1328
1329- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1330 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1331 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1332
1333- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1334 used as patterns.
1335
1336- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1337 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1338 than Tk 8.3.
1339
1340- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1341
1342- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001343
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001344Tools/Demos
1345-----------
1346
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001347- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1348
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001349- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1350
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001351- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001352
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001353Build
1354-----
1355
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001356- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1357
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001358- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1359
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001360- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1361 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001362
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001363- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1364 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1365 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001366
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001367C API
1368-----
1369
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001370- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1371 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1372
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001373Windows
1374-------
1375
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001376- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1377 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1378 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1379 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1380 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1381 Python exception ::
1382
1383 thread.error: can't start new thread
1384
1385 is raised now.
1386
1387- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1388 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1389 instead of from DLL teardown.
1390
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001391Mac
1392---
1393
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001394- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001395 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001396 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1397 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1398 the executable in the bundle.
1399
1400- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001401
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001402- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1403
1404- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1405 on Panther.
1406
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001407What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1408================================
1409
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001410*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001411
1412Core and builtins
1413-----------------
1414
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001415- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1416 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1417 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1418 with the -i option.
1419
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001420- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1421 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1422
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001423- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1424 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1425
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001426- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1427 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1428 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1429 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1430 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1431 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1432 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1433 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1434 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1435 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1436 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1437 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1438 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001439
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001440- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1441 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1442 embedded in a lambda expression.
1443
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001444- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1445 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1446 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1447 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1448 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1449
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001450- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1451 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1452 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1453
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001454- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1455 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1456
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001457- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1458 It's writable again.
1459
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001460- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1461 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1462 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001463 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001464
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001465- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1466 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1467 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1468
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001469Extension modules
1470-----------------
1471
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001472- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1473 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1474
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001475- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1476 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1477 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1478 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1479
1480- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1481 collection.
1482
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001483- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1484 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1485 unique within a single program run.
1486
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001487- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1488 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1489
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001490- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1491 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1492
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001493- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1494 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001495
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001496- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1497
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001498- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1499 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1500
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001501- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1502 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1503 for many BSD-derived systems.
1504
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001505
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001506Library
1507-------
1508
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001509- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1510 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1511 primary ones:
1512
1513 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1514 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1515 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1516
1517 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1518 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1519 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1520 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1521 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1522 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1523
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001524- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1525 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1526 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1527 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1528 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1529 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1530 argument.
1531
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001532- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1533 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1534 in the archive.
1535
1536- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1537 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1538
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001539- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1540 569574).
1541
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001542- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1543 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1544 no more.
1545
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001546- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1547 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1548 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1549 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1550 code coverage.
1551
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001552- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1553 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1554 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001555 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1556 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001557
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001558- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1559 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1560 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001561 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001562
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001563- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1564
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001565- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1566 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1567 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1568 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1569
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001570- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1571 handling.
1572
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001573- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1574 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1575
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001576- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1577 in socket.py.
1578
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001579- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1580
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001581- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1582 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1583 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1584 opener with proxy support.
1585
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001586- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1587
1588- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1589
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001590Tools/Demos
1591-----------
1592
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001593- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1594
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001595- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1596
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001597- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1598 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001599
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001600- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1601 files.
1602
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001603Build
1604-----
1605
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001606- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001607 different root directory.
1608
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001609C API
1610-----
1611
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001612- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1613 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1614 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1615 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1616 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1617 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1618 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1619 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1620 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1621 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1622
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001623- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1624 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1625 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1626 from Python.
1627
1628
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001629New platforms
1630-------------
1631
1632None this time.
1633
1634Tests
1635-----
1636
1637- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1638 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1639
1640Windows
1641-------
1642
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001643- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1644
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001645- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1646 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1647 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1648 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1649 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1650 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1651 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1652 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1653 that's what it's for.
1654
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001655Mac
1656---
1657
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001658- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1659 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1660 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1661 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001662- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1663 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1664- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001665
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001666SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1667------------------------------------
1668
1669430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1670598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1671622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1672661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1673683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1674697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1675713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1676724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1677727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1678729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1679730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1680731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1681732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1682733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1683735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1684740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1685744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1686745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1687747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1688749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1689751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1690753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1691755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1692757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1693760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1694
1695
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001696What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1697================================
1698
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001699*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001700
1701Core and builtins
1702-----------------
1703
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001704- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1705 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1706
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001707- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1708 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1709 and cannot be strings).
1710
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001711- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1712 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1713 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1714 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1715
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001716- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1717 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1718 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1719 Python itself.
1720
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001721- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1722 the referenced object, if it has one.
1723
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001724- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1725 the thread started at
1726 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1727
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001728- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1729 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1730 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1731 placed on a list index.
1732
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001733- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1734 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1735 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1736 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1737
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001738- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1739 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1740 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1741 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1742 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1743 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1744 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1745
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001746- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1747 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1748 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1749 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1750 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1751
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001752- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1753 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001754
1755- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1756 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1757 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1758 #693195.)
1759
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001760- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1761 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001762
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001763- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001764 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001765 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1766 interpreter executions, would fail.
1767
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001768- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001769 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001770 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001771
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001772Extension modules
1773-----------------
1774
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001775- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1776 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1777 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1778 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1779
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001780- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1781 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1782
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001783- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1784 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1785 and Greg Chapman.)
1786
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001787- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1788 recursively.
1789
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001790- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001791 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1792 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1793 leaks.
1794
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001795- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1796
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001797- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1798 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1799 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1800 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1801 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1802 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1803 #705836.
1804
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001805- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001806 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1807
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001808- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1809 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1810 See SF bug #692416.
1811
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001812- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1813 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1814
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001815- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1816 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1817 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001818
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001819- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001820 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1821 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1822
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001823- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1824 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1825 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1826 timeouts to work properly.
1827
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001828Library
1829-------
1830
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001831- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1832 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1833 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1834 future release.
1835
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001836- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1837 for querying platform dependent features.
1838
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001839- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001840
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001841- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1842 pickle protocol versions.
1843
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001844- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1845 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1846 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1847
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001848- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1849
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001850- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1851 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1852 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1853 modules.
1854
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001855- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1856 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1857 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1858
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001859- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1860 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1861
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001862- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1863 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1864 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1865
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001866- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001867 MS Office extensions.
1868
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001869- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1870 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1871
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001872- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1873 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1874
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001875- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1876 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1877 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1878 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1879 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1880 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1881
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001882- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1883 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1884 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001885
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001886- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1887 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1888 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1889
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001890- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1891
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001892- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1893 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1894 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1895
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001896Tools/Demos
1897-----------
1898
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001899- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1900 See the module docstring for details.
1901
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001902Build
1903-----
1904
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001905- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1906 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001907
1908C API
1909-----
1910
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001911- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1912
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001913- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1914 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1915 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1916
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001917- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1918 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001919
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001920 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1921 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1922 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001923
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001924- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001925 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1926
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001927- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1928 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1929 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001930
1931New platforms
1932-------------
1933
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001934None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001935
1936Tests
1937-----
1938
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001939- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1940 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001941
1942Windows
1943-------
1944
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001945- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1946 function.
1947
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001948- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1949 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001950
1951Mac
1952---
1953
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001954- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1955 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001956
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001957- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1958 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001959
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001960- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1961 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1962 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001963
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001964- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001965 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1966 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001967
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001968- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1969 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001970
1971
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001972What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1973=================================
1974
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001975*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001976
1977Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001978-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001979
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001980- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1981 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1982 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1983
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001984- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1985 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1986 (SF patch #664376.)
1987
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001988- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1989 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1990 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1991 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1992 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1993 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001994 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001995
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001996- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1997 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1998 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1999 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002000 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002001
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002002- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2003 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2004 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2005 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2006 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2007 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2008 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2009 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2010 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2011 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2012 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2013
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002014- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2015 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2016 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2017 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2018 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2019 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2020
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002021- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2022 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2023
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002024- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2025 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2026 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2027 case.)
2028
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002029- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2030 passed as unicode strings.
2031
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002032- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2033 See SF bug #683467.
2034
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002035- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2036 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2037
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002038- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2039
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002040- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2041
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002042- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2043 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2044 arguments.
2045
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002046- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2047 See SF bug #667147.
2048
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002049- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002050 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002051 See SF bug #676155.
2052
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002053- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002054 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002055 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2056 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2057 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2058 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2059 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2060 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002061
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002062Extension modules
2063-----------------
2064
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002065- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2066 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2067 tp_as_number pointer.
2068
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002069- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2070 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2071 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2072 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2073 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2074
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002075- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2076
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002077- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2078
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002079- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002080 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002081 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2082 patch #678531.)
2083
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002084- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2085 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2086
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002087- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2088 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2089
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002090- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2091
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002092- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2093 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2094 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2095
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002096- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2097
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002098- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2099 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2100
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002101- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002102
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002103- datetime changes:
2104
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002105 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2106
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002107 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2108 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2109 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2110 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2111 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2112 now.
2113
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002114 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002115 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2116 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002117
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002118 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002119 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002120 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2121 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2122 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2123 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002124
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002125 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2126 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2127 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002128 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2129
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002130 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2131 by a later example coded by Guido.
2132
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002133 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002134 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2135 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2136 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002137 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2138 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2139
2140 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2141 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2142 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2143 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2144 tzinfo subclass instance.
2145
2146 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2147 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2148 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2149 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2150 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2151 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2152 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2153 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002154
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002155 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2156 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2157 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2158 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2159 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002160 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2161
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002162 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002163
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002164 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2165 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2166 as a naive datetime object.
2167
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002168 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2169 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2170 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2171
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002172 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2173 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2174 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2175 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2176 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2177 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2178 comparison.
2179
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002180 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2181 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2182 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2183 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002184 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002185
2186 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002187
2188 and ::
2189
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002190 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2191
2192 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2193 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2194 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2195 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2196
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002197 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2198 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2199 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2200 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2201 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2202
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002203 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2204 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002205 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2206 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002207
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002208Library
2209-------
2210
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002211- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2212 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2213
2214- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2215 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2216 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2217 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2218 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2219 See PEP 307 for details.
2220
2221- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2222 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2223
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002224- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2225 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002226 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002227 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2228 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002229 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002230
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002231- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2232 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2233
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002234- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2235 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2236 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2237
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002238- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2239
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002240- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2241 exception.
2242
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002243- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2244 class.
2245
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002246- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2247 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2248 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2249
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002250- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2251 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2252
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002253- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002254 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2255 See SF bug #659228.
2256
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002257- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2258 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2259 See SF patch #651082.
2260
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002261- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002262
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002263- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2264 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2265
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002266- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002267 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002268
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002269- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2270 DOS paths from other platforms.
2271
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002272Tools/Demos
2273-----------
2274
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002275- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2276 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2277 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2278 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2279 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2280 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2281 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2282 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2283 example:
2284
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002285 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2286 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002287
2288 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2289
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002290
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002291Build
2292-----
2293
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002294- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2295 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2296 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002297 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2298
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002299 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2300
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002301- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2302 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2303 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2304 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2305 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2306 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2307 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2308 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2309 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2310
2311- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2312 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2313 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2314 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2315
2316- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2317 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2318
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002319C API
2320-----
2321
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002322- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2323 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002324
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002325- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2326 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2327 tp_as_number pointer.
2328
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002329- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2330 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2331 (SF #681367)
2332
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002333- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2334 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2335 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2336 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002337
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002338Tests
2339-----
2340
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002341- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002342 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2343 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2344 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2345 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2346 pydoc.)
2347
2348- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2349
2350- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002351
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002352Windows
2353-------
2354
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002355- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2356 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2357 time).
2358
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002359- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2360 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2361
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002362- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2363 release without strong cryptography.
2364
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002365- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002366 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002367
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002368- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2369 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2370
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002371Mac
2372---
2373
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002374- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2375 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002376
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002377- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2378 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2379 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002380
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002381- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2382 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002383
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002384- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2385 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2386 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2387 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002388
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002389- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002390 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2391 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2392 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002393
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002394
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002395What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002396=================================
2397
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002398*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002399
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002400Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002401--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002402
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002403- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2404
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002405- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2406 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002407 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002408 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002409 a different meaning than before.
2410
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002411- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002412 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002413 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002414
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002415- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002416 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002417 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002418
2419- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2420 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2421 and deallocation.
2422
2423- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2424 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2425
2426- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2427 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2428 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2429 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2430 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2431
2432- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2433 now detected by the garbage collector.
2434
2435- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2436 [SF bug 519621]
2437
2438- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2439 identifier.
2440
2441- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2442 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2443 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2444 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2445 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2446 [SF bug 563060]
2447
2448- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2449 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2450 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2451 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2452 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2453
2454- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2455 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2456 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2457
2458- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2459
2460- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2461 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2462 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2463 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2464 state of the slots would be lost.)
2465
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002466Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002467-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002468
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002469- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002470 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2471 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2472 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2473 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002474 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2475 Jython 2.1.
2476
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002477- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002478 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002479 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2480 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2481 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2482 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2483 these, see PEP 302.
2484
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002485- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2486 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2487 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2488
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002489- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2490 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2491 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2492
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002493- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2494 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2495 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2496
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002497- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2498 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2499 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2500 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2501 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2502 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2503 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2504 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2505 releases or implementations.
2506
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002507- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002508 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2509 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002510
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002511- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2512 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2513
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002514- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2515 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2516 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2517
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002518- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2519 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2520
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002521- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2522 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002523 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2524 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002525
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002526- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2527 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2528 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2529 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2530 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2531
2532 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2533 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2534 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2535 pattern.
2536
2537 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2538 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2539 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2540 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2541
2542 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2543 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2544 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2545 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2546 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2547 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2548
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002549- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2550 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2551 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2552 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2553 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2554 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2555 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2556 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002557
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002558- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2559 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2560 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2561 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2562 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002563 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2564 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2565 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2566 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2567 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2568 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2569 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002570
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002571- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2572 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2573
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002574- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2575 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2576 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2577 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2578 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2579 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2580 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2581 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2582 to Zack Weinberg!
2583
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002584- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2585 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2586 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2587 type. This has been fixed now.
2588
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002589- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2590 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2591 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2592
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002593- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2594 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2595 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2596 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2597 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2598 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2599 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2600 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002601 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002602
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002603- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2604 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2605 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002606
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002607- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2608 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2609 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2610 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2611 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2612 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2613 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2614 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002615 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002616 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2617 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2618
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002619- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2620 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2621 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2622 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2623 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2624 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2625 this.)
2626
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002627- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2628 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002629 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002630 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002631 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2632 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002633 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2634 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002635
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002636- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2637 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2638 currently running.
2639
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002640- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2641 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2642 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2643 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2644
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002645- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2646 as directory names.
2647
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002648- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2649 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2650
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002651- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2652 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2653
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002654- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002655 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2656 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002657
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002658- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2659 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2660 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2661 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2662 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2663
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002664- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2665 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2666 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2667 removed.
2668
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002669- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2670 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2671 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2672
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002673- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2674 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2675 to __debug__.
2676
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002677- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2678 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2679 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2680
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002681- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2682 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2683 deprecated now.
2684
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002685- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2686 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2687 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002688
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002689- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2690 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2691 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2692 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2693 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002694
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002695- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2696 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2697
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002698- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2699 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2700 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002701 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002702 is backward compatible.
2703
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002704- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2705 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2706 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2707 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2708 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2709
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002710- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2711 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2712 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2713 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2714 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2715 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002716
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002717- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2718 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2719
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002720- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2721 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2722
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002723- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2724 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2725 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2726 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2727 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2728
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002729- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2730 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2731 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2732
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002733- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002734 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2735
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002736- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2737 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2738 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002739
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002740- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2741 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2742
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002743- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2744 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2745 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2746
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002747- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2748
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002749Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002750-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002751
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002752- Added three operators to the operator module:
2753 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2754 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2755 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2756
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002757- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2758
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002759- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2760 archives.
2761
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002762- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2763 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2764 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2765
2766 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2767
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002768- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2769 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2770 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002771 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002772
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002773- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2774 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2775 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2776 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002777 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2778 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2779 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2780 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002781
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002782- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2783 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002784
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002785- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2786
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002787- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2788 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2789
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002790- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2791 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2792 supported.
2793
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002794- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2795
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002796- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2797 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002798
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002799- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2800 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2801
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002802- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2803
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002804- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2805 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2806
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002807- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2808 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2809 functions but callable type objects.
2810
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002811- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002812 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002813 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002814
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002815- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2816 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002817
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002818- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2819 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002820
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002821- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2822 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2823 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2824 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2825
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002826- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2827 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002828
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002829- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2830 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2831 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2832 and __imul__.
2833
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002834- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002835 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2836 is called.
2837
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002838- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2839 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2840 interpreter was compiled.
2841
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002842- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2843 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2844 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002845 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002846 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2847 1, not 2.
2848
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002849- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2850 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2851 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2852 limit.
2853
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002854- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2855 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2856 bug #623464.
2857
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002858- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2859 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2860 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2861 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002863Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002864-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002865
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002866- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2867
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002868- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2869 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2870 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2871 with Python 2.3a2.
2872
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002873- os.path exposes getctime.
2874
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002875- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002876 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002877 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002878 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002879 unit tests of floating point results.
2880
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002881- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2882 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2883 has been increased.
2884
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002885- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2886 executed.
2887
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002888- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2889 postinstallation script.
2890
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002891- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2892 test the current module.
2893
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002894- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002895 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2896 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2897 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2898 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2899
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002900- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002901 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002902 Ward's Optik package.
2903
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002904- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2905 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2906 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2907 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2908
2909- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2910 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002911 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002912
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002913- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2914 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2915 shelf are binary pickles.
2916
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002917- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2918 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2919
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002920- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2921 modules are iterators now.
2922
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002923- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2924 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2925 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2926 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2927 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2928 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002929
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002930- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2931 with their entity value.
2932
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002933- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2934
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002935- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2936 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002937
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002938- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2939 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002940 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002941
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002942- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2943 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2944 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2945 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2946 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2947 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2948 main():
2949
2950 import locale
2951 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2952
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002953- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2954 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2955
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002956- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2957 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2958 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2959 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2960 to the new standard.
2961
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002962- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2963 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2964 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2965 an extension to the database.
2966
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002967- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2968 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2969 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2970 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002971 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002972
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002973- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002974 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002975
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002976- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2977 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2978 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2979 bounded integers.
2980
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002981- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2982 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2983 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2984 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2985 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2986 in existence.
2987
2988 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2989 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2990 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2991 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2992 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2993 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2994
2995 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2996 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2997 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2998 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2999
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003000- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3001 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3002 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3003
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003004- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3005
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003006- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3007 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3008 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3009 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3010
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003011- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3012 argument.
3013
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003014- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3015 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3016 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3017 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3018 [SF patch 560794].
3019
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003020- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3021 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3022 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003023 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3024 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3025 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003026
3027- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3028 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003029
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003030- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3031 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3032 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3033 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003034
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003035- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3036 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3037 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3038 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3039 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3040
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003041- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003042
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003043- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3044
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003045- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3046 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3047 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3048 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3049 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3050 identical to None.
3051
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003052- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3053 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3054 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3055 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3056 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3057 results now.
3058
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003059- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3060 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3061
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003062- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3063 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3064 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3065 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3066 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3067 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3068 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3069 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3070
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003071- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3072
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003073- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3074 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3075
3076- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3077 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3078 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3079 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3080 and other systems.
3081
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003082- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3083 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3084 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3085 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 +00003086 work well with these.
3087
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003088- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3089
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003090- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003091 connections.
3092
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003093- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3094 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3095 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3096
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003097- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3098 sets
3099
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003100- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3101 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3102 name.
3103
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003104- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3105 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3106 passed in.
3107
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003108- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003109 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003110 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3111 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003112
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003113- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3114
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003115- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3116
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003117- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3118 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3119 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3120
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003121- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3122 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3123 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3124 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003125 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003126
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003127- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003128 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003129 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003130
3131- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3132 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3133 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3134
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003135- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003136 the value of its expression argument.
3137
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003138- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3139 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3140 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3141
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003142- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3143 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3144 skipstone browser was included.
3145
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003146- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3147 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3148
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003149Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003151
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003152- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3153 names in addition to accepting file names.
3154
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003155- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3156 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3157 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3158 still used and useful.)
3159
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003160- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3161 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3162 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3163 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003164
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003165- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3166 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3167 the generated binary.
3168
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003169Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003170-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003171
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003172- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3173
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003174- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3175 except in the hands of experts.
3176
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003177- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003178 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3179 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3180 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003181
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003182- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3183 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3184 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3185 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3186 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3187 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3188 builds.
3189
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003190- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3191 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3192 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3193 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3194 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3195 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3196 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3197 new type.
3198
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003199- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003200
3201 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3202 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3203 positive infinities.
3204
3205 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3206 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3207 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3208 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3209 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3210 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3211 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3212
3213 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3214
3215 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3216
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003217- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3218 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3219 size of the executable.
3220
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003221- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3222 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3223 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3224 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003225
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003226- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3227
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003228- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3229 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3230 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003231
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003232- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3233 well as Unix.
3234
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003235- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3236 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3237 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3238 modules in the README file for details.
3239
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003240C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003241-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003242
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003243- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3244 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003245 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003246 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003247 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003248
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003249- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3250 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3251 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3252 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3253 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3254 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003255 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003256 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3257 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3258 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3259 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3260 aligned.)
3261
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003262- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3263 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3264 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3265
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003266- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3267 level.
3268
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003269- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3270 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3271 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3272 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3273 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3274
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003275- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3276 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3277 code.
3278
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003279- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3280 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3281 adjusting for negative indices.
3282
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003283- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3284 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3285 object.
3286
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003287- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3288 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3289 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3290
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003291- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3292 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003293
3294- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3295
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003296- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3297 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3298 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3299 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3300
3301- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3302
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003303- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003304
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003305- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003306 without going through the buffer API.
3307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003309
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003310- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3311 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3312 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3313 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3314
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003315- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3316 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3317
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003318- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003319 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3320
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003321New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003323
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003324- OpenVMS is now supported.
3325
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003326- AtheOS is now supported.
3327
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003328- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3329
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003330- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3331
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003332Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333-----
3334
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003335- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3336 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3337 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003338
3339Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003341
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003342- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3343 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3344 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3345 bugs.
3346 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003347 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003348 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3349 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003350 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003351
3352- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003353 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003354
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003355- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3356 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3357
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003358- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3359 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003360 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003361 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3362
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003363- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3364 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3365 use files" uninstall option).
3366
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003367- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3368
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003369- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3370 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3371
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003372- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3373 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3374 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3375
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003376- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3377 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3378 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3379 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3380 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003381 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3382 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3383 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003384
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003385- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003386 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003387 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3388 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3389 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3390 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3391 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3392 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3393 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3394 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3395 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3396 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3397 work around.
3398
3399- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3400 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3401 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3402 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3403 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3404 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3405 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3406 specified with O_CREAT too).
3407
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003408Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003409----
3410
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003411- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003412
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003413- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3414 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3415 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3416
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003417- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3418 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3419 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3420
3421- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3422 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3423 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3424 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3425 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3426 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3427 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3428 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003429
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003430- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3431 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3432 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003433
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003434- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3435 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3436 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3437 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3438 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003439
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003440- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3441 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3442 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003443
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003444- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3445 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003447- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3448 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3449 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3450 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3451 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003452
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003453- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3454 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3455 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3456
3457- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3458 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3459 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003460
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003461- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3462 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3463 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3464 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003465 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003466
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003467- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3468 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003469
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003470- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3471 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003472
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003473- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003474 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003475 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3476 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003477
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003478
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003479What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003480===============================
3481
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3483
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003484Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003486
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003487- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3488 with a custom metaclass.
3489
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003490Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003492
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003493- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3494 are proxies.
3495
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003496Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003498
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003499- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3500 very short strings.
3501
3502- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3503 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3504 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3505 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3506 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3507
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003508Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003509-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003510
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003511- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3512 close or delete time).
3513
3514- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3515 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3516
3517- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3518
3519- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003520 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003521
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003522Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003524
3525Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003527
3528C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003530
3531New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003533
3534Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003535-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003536
3537Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003538-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003539
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003540- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3541
3542- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3543 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3544
3545- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3546 deleted at process exit time.
3547
3548- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3549 in backslash.
3550
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003551Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003553
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003554- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3555 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3556 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3557
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003558
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003559What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003560===========================
3561
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3563
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003564Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003565--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003566
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003567- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3568 been extensively updated. See
3569
3570 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3571
3572 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3573
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003574- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3575 deleted!
3576
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003577- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3578 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3579 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3580 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3581 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3582
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003583- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3584
3585 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3586 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3587
3588 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3589 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3590 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3591 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3592 supported anyway.
3593
3594 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3595 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3596
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003597- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3598 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3599 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3600 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3601 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003602
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003603- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3604 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3605 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3606
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003607Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003609
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003610- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3611 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3612 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3613 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3614 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3615 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003616 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3617 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3618 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3619 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003620
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003621- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3622 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3623 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3624
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003625Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003627
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003628- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3629
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003630Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003632
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003633- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3634 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3635 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3636 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3637 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3638 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3639
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003640- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3641
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003642- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3643
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003644- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3645
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003646- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3647 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3648 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3649
3650- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3651
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003652Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003653-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003654
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003655- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3656 off a search on Google.
3657
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003658Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003660
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003661- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3662 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3663 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3664 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3665 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3666 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3667 other platforms should do likewise.
3668
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003669- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3670 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3671 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3672
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003673C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003675
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003676- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3677 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3678 producing key-value pairs.
3679
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003680- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003681 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003682 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3683 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3684 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3685 previously went unchallenged.
3686
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003687New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003689
3690Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003692
3693Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003695
3696Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003697----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003698
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003699- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3700 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003701
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003702- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3703 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3704 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3705 home.
3706
3707
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003708What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003709===========================
3710
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003711*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3712
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003713Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003714--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003715
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003716- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3717 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003718
3719 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003720 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003721
3722 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3723 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003724 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003725 This needs to be documented.
3726
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003727- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3728 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3729
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003730- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3731 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3732 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3733
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003734- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3735 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3736
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003737- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3738 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3739 class forbids it).
3740
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003741- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3742 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3743 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3744
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003745- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3746
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003747Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003749
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003750- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3751 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003752 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003753
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003754- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3755 (like 1 + '').
3756
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003757Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003758-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003759
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003760- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3761 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3762 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3763 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003764 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003765 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3766
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003767- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3768 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3769 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3770 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3771
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003772- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3773 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003774 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3775 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3776 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003777
3778- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3779 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003780
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003781- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3782 bytes on its input.
3783
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003784Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003786
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003787- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003788 convenience function.
3789
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003790- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3791 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3792 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003793 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3794 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3795 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3796 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3797 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3798 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003799
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003800- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3801 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3802 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3803 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3804
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003805- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3806 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3807 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3808
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003809- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3810 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3811 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3812 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3813
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003814- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3815 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003817 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3818 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3819 new -l and -e options.
3820
3821- statcache is now deprecated.
3822
3823- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3824 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003825 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003826 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3827 time properly taken into account.
3828
3829- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3830 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3831 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3832 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3833
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003834Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003836
3837Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003839
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003840- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3841 is built with libdb3 if available.
3842
3843- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3844
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003845C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003846-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003847
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003848- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3849 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3850 PySequence_Size().
3851
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003852- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3853
3854- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3855 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3856 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3857
3858- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3859 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3860
3861- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3862 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3863
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003864New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003865-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003866
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003867- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3868 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3869
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003870- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3871 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3872
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003873- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3874
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003875Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003877
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003878- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3879 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3880
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003881Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003883
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003884Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003885----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003886
3887- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3888 removed completely in the next release.
3889
3890- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3891 OSX.
3892
3893- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3894 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3895
3896- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3897
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003898
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003899What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003900===========================
3901
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3903
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003904Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003906
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003907- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003908 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003909 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003910 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3911 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003912 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3913 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003914 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3915 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003916
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003917- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3918 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3919
3920- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3921 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3922
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003923Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003925
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003926- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3927 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3928 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3929 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3930 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3931 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3932 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3933 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3934
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003935- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3936 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3937 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3938 example).
3939
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003940- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003941 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003942 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003943 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003944
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003945- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3946 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3947 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003948 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003949
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003950- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3951 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3952 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3953 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3954 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3955 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3956
3957 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3958
3959 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3960
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003961Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003962-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003963
3964- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3965
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003966- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3967
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003968- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3969 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003970
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003971- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3972 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3973 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3974 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3975 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3976 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003977 attributes.
3978
3979- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3980 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3981 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003982
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003983- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3984 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3985 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003986
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003987- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3988 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3989 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003990 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3991 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3992
3993- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3994 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003995
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003996Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003998
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003999- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4000 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4001
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004002- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4003 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4004 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4005 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4006
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004007- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4008 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4009 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4010 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4011
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004012 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4013 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4014 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4015 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4016 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4017 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4018 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4019 without losing information).
4020
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004021- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004022 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4023 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4024 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4025 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4026 module).
4027
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004028 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004029 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4030 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4031 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4032 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004033
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004034- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004035 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4036 encoding.
4037
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004038- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4039 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4040
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004042 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4043
4044- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4045 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4046 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4047 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4048
4049- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4050
4051- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4052 ON, and OFF.
4053
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004054- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4055 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4056
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004057Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004059
4060- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4061 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4062 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004063
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004064- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4065 been added: -X and -E.
4066
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004067Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004069
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004070- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4071 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4072
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004073C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004075
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004076- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4077 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4078 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4079 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4080 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4081
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004082- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4083 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4084 as long) arguments.
4085
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004086- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4087 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4088 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4089 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4090 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4091 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4092
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004093- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4094 input.
4095
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004096New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004098
4099Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004101
4102Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004104
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004105- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4106 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4107 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4108
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004109- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4110 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4111 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004112 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004113
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4115 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4116 import signal
4117 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004118
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004120 while 1:
4121 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004123 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4124 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4125 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4126 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004127
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004128
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004129What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4130===========================
4131
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4133
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004134Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004136
4137- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4138 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4139 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4140
4141- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4142 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4143 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4144 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4145 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4146 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4147 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004148
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004149- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004150 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004151 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4152 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4153 associate a docstring with a property.
4154
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004155- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4156 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4157 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4158 other built-in object types.
4159
4160- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4161 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4162 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4163 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4164 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4165
4166- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4167 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4168
4169- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4170 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004171 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004172 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4173 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4174 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4175 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4176 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4177
4178- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4179 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4180 class.
4181
4182- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4183 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4184 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4185 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4186
4187- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4188 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4189 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4190 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4191
4192- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4193 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4194
4195- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4196 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4197 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4198 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4199 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004200 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004201 with the same value as s.
4202
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004203- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4204
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004205Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004207
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004208- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4209
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004210- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4211 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4212 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4213 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4214 objects.
4215
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004216- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4217 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004218 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4219 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4220
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004221- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4222 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4223 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4224
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004225Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004227
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004228- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4229 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4230 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4231 by the instances.
4232
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004233- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4234 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4235 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4236
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004237- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4238 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4239 before the entire comparison is complete.
4240
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004241- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4242 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4243 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4244
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004245- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4246 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4247 getwriter().
4248
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004249- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4250 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4251
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004252- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004253 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4254 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4255
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004256- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4257 iterable object.
4258
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004259- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4260 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004261
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004262- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4263 authentication.
4264
4265- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4266 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004267
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004268- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004269 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4270 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4271 a sample driver.)
4272
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004273Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004275
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004276- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4277 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4278 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4279 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4280 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4281 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4282 kernel has large file support.
4283
4284- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4285 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4286 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4287 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4288 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4289
4290- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4291 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4292 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4293
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004294C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004296
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004297- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4298 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4299
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004300New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004302
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004303- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4304 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4305
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004306Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004308
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004309- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4310 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4311 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4312 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4313 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4314
4315- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4316 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4317 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4318 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4319
4320- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4321 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4322
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004323Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004325
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004326- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004327 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4328 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004329
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004330
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004331What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4332===========================
4333
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4335
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004336Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004338
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004339- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4340 big to represent as a C double.
4341
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004342- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4343 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4344 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4345 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4346 restriction).
4347
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004348- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4349 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4350 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4351 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4352 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4353
4354 >>> dir([])
4355 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4356 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4357 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4358 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4359 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4360 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4361 'reverse', 'sort']
4362
4363 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4364
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004365- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004366 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4367 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4368 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4369 OverflowError exception.
4370
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004371- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004372 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004373 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4374 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4375 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4376 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4377 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004378 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4380 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4381
4382 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4383 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4384 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4385 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004386
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004387- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004388 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4389 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4390 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4391 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4392 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4393 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4394 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4395 once it is created.
4396
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004397- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4398 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4399 (key, value) pairs.
4400
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004401- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004402 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4403 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4404
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004405- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4406 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4407 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4408 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4409 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004410
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004411- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004412 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4413 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4414
4415 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4416
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004417- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004418 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4419
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004420Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004422
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004423- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004424 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4425 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004426
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004427- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4428 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4429 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4430 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4431 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4432 in this area anymore).
4433
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004434- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4435 threading.Timer.
4436
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004437- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4438 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4439
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004440- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004441 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4442
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004443- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004444 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4445 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4446 converted to Python longs.
4447
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004448- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004449 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4450
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004451- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4452 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4453 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4454
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004455Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004457
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004458- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4459 division operators as per PEP 238.
4460
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004461Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004463
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004464- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4465 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4466 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4467 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4468
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004469C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004470-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004471
4472- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004473
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004474- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4475 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004476 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004477
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4479 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004480 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004482
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004483- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004484 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4485 module:
4486
4487 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004488
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004489 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4490 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004491
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004492 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4493 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004494
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004495 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4496
4497 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4498
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004499- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004500 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4501 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4502 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004503
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004504New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004506
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004507- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4508 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4509 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4510 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4511 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004512
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004513Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004515
4516Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004518
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004519- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4520 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4521 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4522 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004523 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4524 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4525 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4526 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4527 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004528
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004529- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004530 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4531
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004532
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004533What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4534===========================
4535
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4537
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004538Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004540
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004541- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4542 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4543
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004544- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4545 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4546 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004547
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004548- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4549 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4550 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4551 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004552
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004553- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4554
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004556
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004557Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004559
4560- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004561 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004562 the module docstring for details.
4563
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004564Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004566
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004567- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004568 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4569 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4570 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004571
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004572- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4573 Nick Mathewson.
4574
4575Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004577
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004578- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4579 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4580 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4581 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4582 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4583 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4584 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4585 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4586
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004587- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4588 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4589 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4590 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4591
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004592- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4593 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4594 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4595 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4596 come a long way).
4597
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004598- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4599 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4600 write filters for these warnings).
4601
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004602- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4603 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4604 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4605 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4606 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4607
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004608- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4609 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4610 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4611 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4612 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4613 older distribution.
4614
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004615Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004617
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004618- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4619 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004620 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004621
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004622- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4623 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4624 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4625
4626- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4627
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004628- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4629
4630- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4631
4632- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4633
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004635
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004636- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4637
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004638New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004640
4641C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004643
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004644- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4645 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4646 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4647 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4648 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4649 against buffer overruns.
4650
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004651- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004652 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4653 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004654 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4655 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4656 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4657
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004658- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4659 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4660 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4661 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4662 deprecated.
4663
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004664Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004666
4667- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4668 relevant is found.
4669
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004670
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004671What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004672===========================
4673
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4675
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004676Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004678
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004679- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4680 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4681 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4682 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4683 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4684 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4685 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4686 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004687 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004688 repaired.
4689
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004690- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004691 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004692 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4693 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4694 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4695 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4696 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4697 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4698 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4699 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4700
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004701- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4702 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4703 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4704 leading BMO character).
4705
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004706- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4707 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4708 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4709
4710 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4711 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4712 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004713
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004714 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4715 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4716 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4717 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4718 for various simple to use conversions.
4719
4720 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4721 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4724 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4725 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4726 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4727 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4728 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4729 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4730 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4731 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4732 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4733 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4734 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4735 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4736 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4737 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004738
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004739- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4740 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4741 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004742 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004743 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004744
4745 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004746 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4747 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4748 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4749 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4750 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004751 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4752 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004753
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004754 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4755 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4756 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004757 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004758
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004759- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4760 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4761 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4762 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4763 floating arithmetic,
4764
4765 x = 9007199254740992.0
4766 print long(x)
4767
4768 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4769 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4770 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4771 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4772 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4773 functions are of good quality).
4774
4775 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4776 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4777 algorithms to break.
4778
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004779- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4780 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4781 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4782 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4783 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4784 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4785 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4786 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4787 order.
4788
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004789- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4790 operation along the most common code paths.
4791
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004792- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4793 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4794
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004795- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4796 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4797 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4798 {}.update(UserDict())
4799
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004800- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4801 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4802 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4803 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4804 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4805 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4806 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4807 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4808
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004809- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004810 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004812 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004813 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4814 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004815 join() method of strings
4816 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004817 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4818 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004820 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004821
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004822- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4823 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4824
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004825- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4826 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4827
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004828- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4829 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4830 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4831 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4832
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004833- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4834 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004835 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004836 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4837 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004838
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004839- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4840
4841
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004842Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004844
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004845- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004846 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004847 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4848 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4849
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004850- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4851 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4852
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004853- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4854 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4855 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4856 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4857
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004858- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4859 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4860 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4861
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004862- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4863
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004864- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4865
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004866- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4867 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4868 that are still imported into string.py).
4869
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004870- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4871
4872- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4873 Now it does.
4874
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004875- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4876
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004877- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4878 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4879 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4880 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4881 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004882 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4883 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004884
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004885- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4886 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4887 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4888 'help(object)'.
4889
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004890Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004891-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004892
4893- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004894 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004895 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4896 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4897
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004898- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004899 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4900 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004901
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004902C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004904
4905- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4906 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004907
4908----
4909
4910**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**