blob: cafb04ae0efffdb9a3fce19365c9c8d55acdf13b [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000015- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
16 constant.
17
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000018- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
19 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
20 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
21 large), and to anomalies such as
22 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
23 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
24 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
25 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000026
27Extension modules
28-----------------
29
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +000030- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
31 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
32 an assert failure in a debug build.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000033
34Library
35-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000036
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000037- Updates for the email package:
38 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
39 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
40 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
41 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
42 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
43 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
44 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
45 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
46 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
47 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
48 + Updates to documentation.
49
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000050- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
51 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
52 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
53 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
54
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000055- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000056
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000057- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
58 applications should use the getmember function.
59
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000060- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
61
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000062- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
63 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
64 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
65 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
66 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
67 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
68 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
69 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
70 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
71
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000072- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
73 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000074 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000075
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000076- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
77 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
78 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
79 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
80 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
81 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
82 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
83 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000084
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +000085- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
86 the new public features (of which there are many).
87
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000088- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000089 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
90 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
91 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
92 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +000093 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000094
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000095- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
96
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +000097- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
98 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
99 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
100 options.
101
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000102- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
103 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
104 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
105 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
106 conditions under which non-string values work.
107
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000108Build
109-----
110
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000111- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
112 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
113 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
114
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000115- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
116 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
117 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
118 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
119 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000120
121C API
122-----
123
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000124- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
125
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000126- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
127 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
128 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000129
130Documentation
131-------------
132
133...
134
135Tests
136-----
137
138- test__locale ported to unittest
139
140Windows
141-------
142
143...
144
145Mac
146---
147
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000148- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
149 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
150 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000151
152New platforms
153-------------
154
155...
156
157Tools/Demos
158-----------
159
160...
161
162
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000163What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
164=================================
165
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000166*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000167
168Core and builtins
169-----------------
170
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000171- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000172 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
173
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000174- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
175 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
176 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
177 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
178 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
179 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
180 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
181 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000182 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
183 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
184 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
185 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
186 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000187
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000188- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
189 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
190 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
191 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
192 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
193
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000194- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
195
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000196- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
197 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
198
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000199- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
200 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
201 modified the list.
202
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000203- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
204 functions is now writable.
205
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000206- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
207 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
208 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
209 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
210
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000211- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
212 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
213 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
214 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
215 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000216
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000217- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
218 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
219
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000220Extension modules
221-----------------
222
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000223- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
224
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000225- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
226 data.
227
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000228- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
229 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
230 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
231 supposed to have been truncated away.
232
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000233- Added socket.socketpair().
234
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000235- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
236 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
237
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000238- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000239 versions of Python, have now been removed.
240
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000241Library
242-------
243
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000244- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000245 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000246
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000247- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
248 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
249
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000250- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
251 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
252
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000253- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
254
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000255- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
256 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000257
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000258- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
259 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
260
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000261- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
262
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000263- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
264
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000265- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
266
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000267- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
268 Percivall.
269
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000270- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
271 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
272
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000273- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
274 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
275 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000276 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000277
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000278- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
279 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
280 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
281 and exponent.
282
283- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
284
285- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
286 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
287 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
288
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000289- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
290 to the readline module.
291
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000292- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000293 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
294 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000295
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000296- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
297 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
298 contains symlinks.
299
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000300- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
301 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
302
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000303- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
304 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
305 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
306
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000307- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
308 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
309 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
310 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
311 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
312 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
313 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
314 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
315 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
316 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
317 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
318 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
319 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
320
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000321- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
322
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000323Tools/Demos
324-----------
325
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000326- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
327 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
328
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000329- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
330
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000331Build
332-----
333
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000334- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
335 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
336 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
337 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
338 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
339 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
340 plans to do so.
341
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000342- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
343 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
344
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000345- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
346 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
347
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000348- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
349 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
350
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000351- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
352 GNU/k*BSD systems.
353
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000354- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
355 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
356
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000357C API
358-----
359
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000360..
361
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000362Documentation
363-------------
364
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000365- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
366 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
367
368- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
369 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
370 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000371
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000372New platforms
373-------------
374
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000375- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
376
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000377Tests
378-----
379
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000380..
381
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000382Windows
383-------
384
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000385- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
386 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
387 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
388 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
389 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
390 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
391 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
392 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
393 the problem.
394
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000395Mac
396---
397
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000398..
399
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000400
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000401What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
402=================================
403
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000404*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000405
406Core and builtins
407-----------------
408
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000409- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
410 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
411 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
412 sensitive code.
413
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000414- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000415 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000416
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000417 @staticmethod
418 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000419
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000420 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000421
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000422- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
423 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
424 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
425 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
426 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
427 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
428 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
429 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
430 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
431 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
432 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
433
434 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
435 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
436 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
437 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
438 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
439 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
440 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
441
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000442- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
443 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
444
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000445- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000446 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000447
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000448- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000449 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000450 which was missing for no apparent reason.
451
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000452- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000453 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
454 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
455
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000456- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
457 types that support garbage collection.
458
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000459- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
460
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000461- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
462 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
463 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
464 Jython.
465
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000466- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
467
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000468- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
469 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
470
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000471- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
472 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
473 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000474
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000475- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
476 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
477 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
478
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000479Extension modules
480-----------------
481
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000482- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
483
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000484Library
485-------
486
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000487- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
488 TIS-620
489
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000490- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
491 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
492 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
493 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
494 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
495 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
496 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
497 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
498 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
499 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
500
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000501- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
502
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000503- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
504 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
505 same as when the argument is omitted).
506 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
507
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000508- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
509
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000510- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
511 schemes are offered.
512
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000513- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
514
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000515- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
516 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
517 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
518
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000519- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
520
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000521- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
522 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
523
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000524- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
525 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
526 when dummy_threading is being used.
527
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000528- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
529 from a tarfile.
530
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000531- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000532 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000533
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000534- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
535 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
536 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
537 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
538
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000539- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
540 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
541
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000542- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
543 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
544 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
545 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
546 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
547 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
548 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
549 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
550 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
551 by some other method in progress).
552
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000553- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
554 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
555 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000556
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000557- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
558
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000559- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
560 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
561 AM Kuchling.
562
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000563- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
564 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
565 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
566
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000567- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
568 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
569 instead of unsigned.
570
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000571- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000572 no longer part of the public API.
573
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000574- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
575 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
576 string methods of the same name).
577
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000578- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000579 SF patch 945642.
580
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000581- doctest unittest integration improvements:
582
583 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
584
585 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
586 DocTestSuites.
587
588- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
589 that provide thread-local data.
590
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000591- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
592 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
593
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000594- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
595
596- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
597 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
598 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
599
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000600- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
601
602 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
603 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
604 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000605
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000606 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
607 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
608 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
609 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
610
611 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
612 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
613
614 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
615 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
616 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
617 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
618
619 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
620 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
621 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
622 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
623 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
624
625 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
626 wrapping help output.
627
628 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
629 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
630 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000631
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000632C API
633-----
634
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000635- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
636 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
637 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
638 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
639 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
640 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
641 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
642 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
643 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
644 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
645 its visible semantics have not changed.
646
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000647- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
648 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
649
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000650Documentation
651-------------
652
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000653- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000654
655 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000656 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000657
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000658 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000659
660 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
661
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000662- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000663
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000664Tests
665-----
666
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000667- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000668 platforms that use the Makefile.
669
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000670- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
671 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
672 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
673
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000674
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000675What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
676=================================
677
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000678*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000679
680Core and builtins
681-----------------
682
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000683- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
684 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
685 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
686 objects now (one object instead of three).
687
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000688- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
689 Windows DLLs.
690
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000691- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
692 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000693
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000694- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
695 a new .pyc magic.
696
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000697- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
698 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
699 be there.
700
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000701- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
702 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
703 the LC_NUMERIC category.
704
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000705- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
706 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
707 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
708
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000709- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
710
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000711- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
712 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
713 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000714
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000715- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
716 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
717
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000718- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
719
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000720- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000721 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000722
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000723- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
724
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000725- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
726
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000727- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
728 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
729
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000730- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
731 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
732 Fixes bug #858016 .
733
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000734- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
735 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
736 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
737
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000738- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
739 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
740 improves their performance (about 35%).
741
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000742- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
743 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
744 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
745
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000746- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
747 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
748 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
749 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
750
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000751- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
752 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
753 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
754 length is not known).
755
756- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
757 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000758 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
759 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000760 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
761
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000762- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
763 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
764
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000765- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
766 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
767 keyword arguments.
768
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000769- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
770 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
771 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
772
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000773- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
774 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
775 cases.
776
777- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
778 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
779 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
780 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
781 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
782 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
783 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
784 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
785 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
786 a release build.
787
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000788- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
789 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
790
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000791- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000792 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000793
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000794- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
795 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
796 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
797 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
798 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
799 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
800 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
801 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
802 destroyed.
803
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000804- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
805 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
806 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
807 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
808 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
809 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
810 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
811 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
812
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000813- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
814 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
815 character other than a space.
816
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000817- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
818 by the function object or by the method object, the function
819 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
820 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
821 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
822 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
823 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
824 attributes with the same name.
825
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000826- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
827 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
828 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
829 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
830 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
831 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
832 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
833 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
834 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
835 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
836 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
837 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
838 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
839 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000840
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000841- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
842 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
843 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
844 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
845 This has been repaired.
846
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000847- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
848
849- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
850
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000851- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
852 over a sequence.
853
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000854- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000855 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000856
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000857- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
858
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000859- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
860 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
861 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
862 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
863 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
864 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
865 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
866 records with equal keys is unchanged).
867
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000868- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
869 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
870 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
871
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000872- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
873 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
874 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
875 freelist.
876
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000877- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
878 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
879
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000880- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
881 number.
882
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000883- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
884 a TypeError exception.
885
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000886- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
887 820195.
888
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000889- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
890 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
891 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
892
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000893- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000894 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
895 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000896
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000897- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
898 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
899 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
900
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000901- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
902 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000903 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000904
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000905- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000906 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
907 the first call.
908
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000909
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000910Extension modules
911-----------------
912
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000913- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
914 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
915
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000916- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
917 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
918 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
919 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
920 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
921 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
922 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000923
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000924- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
925
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000926- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
927
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000928- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
929 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
930
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000931- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
932 fewer false positives.
933
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000934- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
935 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
936
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000937- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000938 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
939
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000940- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000941 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000942 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000943 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
944 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000945
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000946- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
947 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
948 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
949 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
950
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000951- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
952 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
953 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
954 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
955 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
956 #897625.
957
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000958- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
959 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
960
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000961- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
962 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
963 and pops on either side of the deque.
964
965- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
966 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
967
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000968- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
969 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
970 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
971 other functions that expect a function argument.
972
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000973- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
974
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000975- os.getsid was added.
976
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000977- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
978 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
979 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
980
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000981- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
982
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000983- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
984
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000985- readline.clear_history was added.
986
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000987- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
988
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000989- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
990
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000991- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
992
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000993- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
994
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000995- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
996
997- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
998
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000999- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1000
1001- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1002
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001003- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1004 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1005 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1006
1007- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1008 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1009 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1010 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1011 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1012 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1013 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1014
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001015- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1016 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1017 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1018 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001019
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001020- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001021 iterators from a single iterable.
1022
1023- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1024 of raising a TypeError exception.
1025
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001026- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1027 as parameter.
1028
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001029Library
1030-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001031
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001032- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1033 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1034 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001035
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001036- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1037 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1038 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001039
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001040- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001041
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001042- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1043 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001044
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001045- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1046 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1047
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001048- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1049
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001050- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001051 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001052
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001053- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001054 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001055
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001056- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1057
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001058- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1059 on cygwin and mingw32.
1060
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001061- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1062
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001063- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1064 module.
1065
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001066- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1067 installation scheme for all platforms.
1068
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001069- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001070 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001071
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001072- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1073 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1074 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1075
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001076- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1077 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1078 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1079
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001080- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1081
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001082- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1083
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001084- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1085 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1086
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001087- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1088 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1089 type pattern with the same value exists.
1090
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001091- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1092 when run from the command prompt).
1093
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001094- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1095 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1096
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001097- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1098 default sort).
1099
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001100- Added global runctx function to profile module
1101
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001102- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1103
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001104- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1105
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001106- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1107
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001108- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001109 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1110 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1111 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1112 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1113 accordingly.
1114
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001115- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1116 decoding standards.
1117
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001118- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1119 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1120 called for all requests.
1121
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001122- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1123 they are passed to the compiler.
1124
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001125- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1126 indent, width and depth.
1127
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001128- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1129 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1130
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001131- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1132 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1133
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001134- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1135
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001136- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1137
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001138- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1139
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001140- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1141 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1142
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001143- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001144 for better performance.
1145
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001146- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001147
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001148- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1149 a string).
1150
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001151- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1152
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001153- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1154
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001155- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1156
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001157- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1158
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001159- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1160 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1161 list of fieldnames.
1162
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001163- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1164 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1165
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001166- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1167
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001168- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1169 empty lists.
1170
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001171- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1172 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1173 and shelves.
1174
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001175- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1176 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1177
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001178- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001179 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1180 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001181
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001182- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1183 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001184 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001185
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001186- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001187 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1188 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1189
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001190- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1191 and removed in Py2.4.
1192
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001193- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1194
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001195- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1196
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001197Tools/Demos
1198-----------
1199
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001200- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1201 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1202
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001203- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1204
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001205- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1206 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1207 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1208 destination in situations where both files are given.
1209
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001210- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1211 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1212 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1213 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1214
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001215- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1216
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001217- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1218 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1219 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1220 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1221 now.
1222
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001223- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1224 in effect
1225
1226- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1227 C-c C-h
1228
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001229- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1230 -d option was given.
1231
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001232Build
1233-----
1234
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001235- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1236 build under OS X.
1237
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001238- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1239 --enable-profiling.
1240
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001241- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1242 is configured --with-tsc.
1243
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001244- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1245 on AMD64.
1246
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001247- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1248 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1249
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001250- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1251 removed.
1252
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001253- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1254 supported (see PEP 11).
1255
1256- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1257
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001258- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1259
1260- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1261 (see PEP 11).
1262
1263- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1264 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1265
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001266C API
1267-----
1268
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001269- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1270 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1271 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1272
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001273- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1274 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1275 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1276 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1277
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001278- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1279 generator objects.
1280
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001281- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1282 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001283 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1284 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001285
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001286- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1287 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1288
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001289- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1290 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1291 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1292 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1293 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1294
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001295- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1296 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1297 about 10% faster.
1298
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001299- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1300 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1301
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001302- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1303 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1304 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1305 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1306
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001307Windows
1308-------
1309
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001310- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1311 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1312 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1313 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1314
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001315- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1316 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1317 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1318
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001319
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001320What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1321===============================
1322
1323*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1324
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001325IDLE
1326----
1327
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001328- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1329 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1330 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1331 context-menu actions.
1332
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001333- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1334 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1335 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1336 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1337 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1338 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1339 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1340 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1341 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1342
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001343
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001344What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1345=============================================
1346
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001347*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001348
1349Core and builtins
1350-----------------
1351
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001352- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001353 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001354 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1355
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001356Extension modules
1357-----------------
1358
1359- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1360 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1361 than once. This has been fixed.
1362
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001363- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1364 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1365 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1366 call.
1367
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001368- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1369
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001370Library
1371-------
1372
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001373- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1374 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1375
1376- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1377 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1378 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1379 restored.
1380
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001381IDLE
1382----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001383
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001384- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001385
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001386Build
1387-----
1388
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001389- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1390 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1391
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001392C API
1393-----
1394
1395Windows
1396-------
1397
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001398- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1399 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1400
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001401- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1402
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001403Mac
1404---
1405
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001406- Various fixes to pimp.
1407
1408- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1409
1410- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1411 more problems than it solves.
1412
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001413
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001414What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1415=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001416
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001417*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1418
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001419Core and builtins
1420-----------------
1421
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001422- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1423 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1424
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001425- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1426 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001427 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001428
1429- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1430 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1431 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001432 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001433
1434- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1435 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001436
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001437- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1438 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1439 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1440
1441- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001442 770247.
1443
1444- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001445
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001446Extension modules
1447-----------------
1448
1449- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1450 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1451
1452- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1453
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001454- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1455
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001456- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1457 contained within the _strptime module.
1458
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001459- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1460 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1461
1462- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001463 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1464
1465- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1466 the find_class attribute, if present.
1467
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001468- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001469
1470 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1471 (SF bug 763298).
1472
1473 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001474 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1475 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1476 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001477
1478 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1479
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001480Library
1481-------
1482
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001483- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1484
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001485- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1486 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1487 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1488 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1489 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1490 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1491 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1492 or Tester().
1493
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001494- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1495 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1496 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1497 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1498 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1499 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1500 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1501 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1502 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001503
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001504 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001505
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001506- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1507 weren't before was an oversight.
1508
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001509- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1510 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1511
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001512- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1513 when there are no lines.
1514
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001515- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1516 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1517
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001518- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1519 to child processes.
1520
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001521- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1522
1523- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1524
1525- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1526 xmlrpclib.
1527
1528- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1529 responses.
1530
1531- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1532 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1533
1534- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1535 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1536 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1537
1538- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1539 used as patterns.
1540
1541- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1542 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1543 than Tk 8.3.
1544
1545- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1546
1547- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001548
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001549Tools/Demos
1550-----------
1551
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001552- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1553
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001554- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1555
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001556- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001557
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001558Build
1559-----
1560
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001561- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1562
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001563- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1564
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001565- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1566 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001567
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001568- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1569 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1570 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001571
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001572C API
1573-----
1574
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001575- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1576 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1577
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001578Windows
1579-------
1580
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001581- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1582 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1583 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1584 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1585 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1586 Python exception ::
1587
1588 thread.error: can't start new thread
1589
1590 is raised now.
1591
1592- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1593 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1594 instead of from DLL teardown.
1595
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001596Mac
1597---
1598
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001599- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001600 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001601 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1602 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1603 the executable in the bundle.
1604
1605- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001606
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001607- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1608
1609- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1610 on Panther.
1611
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001612What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1613================================
1614
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001615*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001616
1617Core and builtins
1618-----------------
1619
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001620- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1621 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1622 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1623 with the -i option.
1624
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001625- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1626 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1627
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001628- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1629 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1630
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001631- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1632 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1633 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1634 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1635 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1636 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1637 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1638 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1639 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1640 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1641 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1642 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1643 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001644
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001645- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1646 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1647 embedded in a lambda expression.
1648
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001649- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1650 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1651 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1652 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1653 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1654
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001655- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1656 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1657 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1658
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001659- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1660 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1661
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001662- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1663 It's writable again.
1664
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001665- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1666 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1667 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001668 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001669
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001670- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1671 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1672 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1673
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001674Extension modules
1675-----------------
1676
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001677- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1678 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1679
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001680- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1681 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1682 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1683 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1684
1685- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1686 collection.
1687
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001688- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1689 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1690 unique within a single program run.
1691
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001692- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1693 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1694
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001695- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1696 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1697
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001698- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1699 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001700
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001701- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1702
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001703- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1704 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1705
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001706- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1707 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1708 for many BSD-derived systems.
1709
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001710
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001711Library
1712-------
1713
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001714- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1715 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1716 primary ones:
1717
1718 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1719 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1720 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1721
1722 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1723 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1724 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1725 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1726 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1727 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1728
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001729- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1730 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1731 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1732 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1733 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1734 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1735 argument.
1736
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001737- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1738 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1739 in the archive.
1740
1741- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1742 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1743
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001744- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1745 569574).
1746
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001747- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1748 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1749 no more.
1750
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001751- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1752 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1753 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1754 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1755 code coverage.
1756
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001757- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1758 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1759 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001760 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1761 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001762
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001763- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1764 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1765 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001766 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001767
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001768- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1769
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001770- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1771 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1772 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1773 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1774
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001775- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1776 handling.
1777
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001778- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1779 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1780
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001781- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1782 in socket.py.
1783
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001784- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1785
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001786- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1787 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1788 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1789 opener with proxy support.
1790
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001791- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1792
1793- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1794
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001795Tools/Demos
1796-----------
1797
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001798- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1799
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001800- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1801
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001802- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1803 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001804
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001805- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1806 files.
1807
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001808Build
1809-----
1810
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001811- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001812 different root directory.
1813
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001814C API
1815-----
1816
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001817- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1818 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1819 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1820 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1821 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1822 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1823 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1824 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1825 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1826 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1827
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001828- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1829 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1830 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1831 from Python.
1832
1833
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001834New platforms
1835-------------
1836
1837None this time.
1838
1839Tests
1840-----
1841
1842- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1843 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1844
1845Windows
1846-------
1847
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001848- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1849
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001850- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1851 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1852 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1853 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1854 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1855 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1856 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1857 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1858 that's what it's for.
1859
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001860Mac
1861---
1862
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001863- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1864 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1865 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1866 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001867- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1868 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1869- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001870
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001871SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1872------------------------------------
1873
1874430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1875598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1876622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1877661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1878683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1879697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1880713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1881724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1882727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1883729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1884730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1885731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1886732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1887733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1888735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1889740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1890744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1891745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1892747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1893749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1894751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1895753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1896755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1897757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1898760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1899
1900
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001901What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1902================================
1903
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001904*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001905
1906Core and builtins
1907-----------------
1908
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001909- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1910 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1911
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001912- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1913 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1914 and cannot be strings).
1915
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001916- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1917 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1918 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1919 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1920
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001921- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1922 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1923 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1924 Python itself.
1925
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001926- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1927 the referenced object, if it has one.
1928
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001929- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1930 the thread started at
1931 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1932
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001933- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1934 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1935 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1936 placed on a list index.
1937
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001938- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1939 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1940 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1941 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1942
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001943- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1944 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1945 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1946 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1947 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1948 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1949 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1950
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001951- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1952 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1953 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1954 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1955 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1956
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001957- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1958 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001959
1960- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1961 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1962 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1963 #693195.)
1964
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001965- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1966 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001967
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001968- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001969 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001970 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1971 interpreter executions, would fail.
1972
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001973- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001974 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001975 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001976
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001977Extension modules
1978-----------------
1979
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001980- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1981 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1982 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1983 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1984
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001985- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1986 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1987
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001988- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1989 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1990 and Greg Chapman.)
1991
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001992- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1993 recursively.
1994
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001995- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001996 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1997 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1998 leaks.
1999
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002000- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2001
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002002- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2003 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2004 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2005 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2006 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2007 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2008 #705836.
2009
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002010- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002011 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2012
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002013- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2014 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2015 See SF bug #692416.
2016
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002017- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2018 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2019
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002020- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2021 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2022 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002023
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002024- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002025 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2026 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2027
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002028- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2029 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2030 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2031 timeouts to work properly.
2032
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002033Library
2034-------
2035
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002036- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2037 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2038 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2039 future release.
2040
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002041- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2042 for querying platform dependent features.
2043
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002044- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002045
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002046- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2047 pickle protocol versions.
2048
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002049- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2050 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2051 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2052
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002053- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2054
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002055- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2056 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2057 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2058 modules.
2059
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002060- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2061 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2062 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2063
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002064- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2065 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2066
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002067- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2068 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2069 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2070
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002071- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002072 MS Office extensions.
2073
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002074- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2075 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2076
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002077- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2078 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2079
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002080- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2081 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2082 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2083 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2084 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2085 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2086
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002087- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2088 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2089 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002090
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002091- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2092 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2093 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2094
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002095- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2096
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002097- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2098 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2099 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2100
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002101Tools/Demos
2102-----------
2103
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002104- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2105 See the module docstring for details.
2106
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002107Build
2108-----
2109
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002110- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2111 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002112
2113C API
2114-----
2115
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002116- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2117
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002118- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2119 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2120 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2121
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002122- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2123 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002124
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002125 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2126 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2127 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002128
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002129- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002130 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2131
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002132- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2133 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2134 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002135
2136New platforms
2137-------------
2138
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002139None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002140
2141Tests
2142-----
2143
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002144- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2145 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002146
2147Windows
2148-------
2149
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002150- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2151 function.
2152
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002153- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2154 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002155
2156Mac
2157---
2158
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002159- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2160 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002161
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002162- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2163 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002164
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002165- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2166 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2167 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002168
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002169- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002170 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2171 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002172
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002173- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2174 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002175
2176
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002177What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2178=================================
2179
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002180*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002181
2182Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002183-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002184
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002185- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2186 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2187 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2188
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002189- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2190 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2191 (SF patch #664376.)
2192
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002193- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2194 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2195 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2196 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2197 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2198 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002199 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002200
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002201- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2202 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2203 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2204 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002205 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002206
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002207- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2208 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2209 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2210 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2211 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2212 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2213 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2214 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2215 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2216 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2217 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2218
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002219- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2220 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2221 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2222 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2223 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2224 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2225
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002226- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2227 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2228
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002229- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2230 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2231 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2232 case.)
2233
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002234- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2235 passed as unicode strings.
2236
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002237- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2238 See SF bug #683467.
2239
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002240- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2241 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2242
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002243- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2244
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002245- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2246
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002247- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2248 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2249 arguments.
2250
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002251- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2252 See SF bug #667147.
2253
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002254- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002255 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002256 See SF bug #676155.
2257
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002258- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002259 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002260 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2261 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2262 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2263 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2264 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2265 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002266
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002267Extension modules
2268-----------------
2269
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002270- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2271 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2272 tp_as_number pointer.
2273
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002274- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2275 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2276 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2277 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2278 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2279
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002280- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2281
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002282- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2283
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002284- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002285 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002286 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2287 patch #678531.)
2288
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002289- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2290 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2291
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002292- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2293 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2294
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002295- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2296
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002297- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2298 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2299 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2300
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002301- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2302
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002303- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2304 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2305
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002306- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002307
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002308- datetime changes:
2309
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002310 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2311
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002312 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2313 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2314 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2315 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2316 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2317 now.
2318
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002319 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002320 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2321 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002322
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002323 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002324 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002325 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2326 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2327 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2328 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002329
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002330 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2331 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2332 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002333 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2334
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002335 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2336 by a later example coded by Guido.
2337
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002338 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002339 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2340 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2341 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002342 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2343 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2344
2345 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2346 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2347 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2348 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2349 tzinfo subclass instance.
2350
2351 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2352 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2353 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2354 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2355 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2356 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2357 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2358 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002359
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002360 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2361 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2362 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2363 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2364 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002365 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2366
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002367 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002368
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002369 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2370 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2371 as a naive datetime object.
2372
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002373 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2374 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2375 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2376
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002377 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2378 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2379 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2380 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2381 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2382 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2383 comparison.
2384
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002385 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2386 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2387 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2388 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002389 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002390
2391 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002392
2393 and ::
2394
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002395 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2396
2397 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2398 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2399 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2400 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2401
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002402 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2403 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2404 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2405 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2406 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2407
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002408 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2409 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002410 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2411 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002412
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002413Library
2414-------
2415
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002416- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2417 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2418
2419- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2420 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2421 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2422 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2423 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2424 See PEP 307 for details.
2425
2426- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2427 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2428
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002429- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2430 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002431 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002432 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2433 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002434 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002435
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002436- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2437 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2438
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002439- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2440 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2441 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2442
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002443- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2444
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002445- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2446 exception.
2447
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002448- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2449 class.
2450
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002451- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2452 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2453 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2454
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002455- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2456 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2457
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002458- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002459 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2460 See SF bug #659228.
2461
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002462- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2463 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2464 See SF patch #651082.
2465
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002466- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002467
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002468- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2469 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2470
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002471- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002472 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002473
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002474- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2475 DOS paths from other platforms.
2476
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002477Tools/Demos
2478-----------
2479
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002480- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2481 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2482 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2483 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2484 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2485 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2486 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2487 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2488 example:
2489
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002490 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2491 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002492
2493 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2494
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002495
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002496Build
2497-----
2498
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002499- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2500 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2501 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002502 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2503
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002504 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2505
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002506- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2507 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2508 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2509 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2510 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2511 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2512 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2513 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2514 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2515
2516- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2517 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2518 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2519 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2520
2521- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2522 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2523
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002524C API
2525-----
2526
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002527- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2528 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002529
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002530- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2531 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2532 tp_as_number pointer.
2533
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002534- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2535 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2536 (SF #681367)
2537
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002538- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2539 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2540 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2541 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002542
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002543Tests
2544-----
2545
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002546- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002547 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2548 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2549 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2550 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2551 pydoc.)
2552
2553- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2554
2555- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002556
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002557Windows
2558-------
2559
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002560- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2561 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2562 time).
2563
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002564- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2565 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2566
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002567- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2568 release without strong cryptography.
2569
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002570- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002571 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002572
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002573- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2574 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2575
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002576Mac
2577---
2578
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002579- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2580 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002581
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002582- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2583 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2584 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002585
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002586- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2587 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002588
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002589- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2590 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2591 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2592 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002593
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002594- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002595 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2596 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2597 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002598
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002599
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002600What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002601=================================
2602
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002603*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002604
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002605Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002607
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002608- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2609
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002610- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2611 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002612 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002613 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002614 a different meaning than before.
2615
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002616- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002617 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002618 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002619
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002620- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002621 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002622 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002623
2624- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2625 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2626 and deallocation.
2627
2628- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2629 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2630
2631- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2632 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2633 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2634 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2635 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2636
2637- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2638 now detected by the garbage collector.
2639
2640- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2641 [SF bug 519621]
2642
2643- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2644 identifier.
2645
2646- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2647 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2648 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2649 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2650 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2651 [SF bug 563060]
2652
2653- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2654 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2655 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2656 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2657 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2658
2659- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2660 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2661 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2662
2663- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2664
2665- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2666 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2667 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2668 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2669 state of the slots would be lost.)
2670
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002671Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002672-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002673
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002674- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002675 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2676 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2677 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2678 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002679 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2680 Jython 2.1.
2681
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002682- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002683 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002684 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2685 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2686 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2687 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2688 these, see PEP 302.
2689
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002690- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2691 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2692 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2693
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002694- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2695 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2696 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2697
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002698- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2699 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2700 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2701
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002702- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2703 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2704 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2705 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2706 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2707 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2708 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2709 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2710 releases or implementations.
2711
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002712- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002713 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2714 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002715
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002716- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2717 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2718
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002719- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2720 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2721 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2722
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002723- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2724 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2725
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002726- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2727 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002728 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2729 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002730
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002731- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2732 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2733 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2734 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2735 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2736
2737 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2738 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2739 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2740 pattern.
2741
2742 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2743 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2744 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2745 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2746
2747 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2748 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2749 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2750 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2751 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2752 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2753
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002754- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2755 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2756 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2757 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2758 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2759 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2760 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2761 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002762
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002763- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2764 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2765 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2766 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2767 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002768 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2769 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2770 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2771 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2772 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2773 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2774 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002775
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002776- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2777 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2778
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002779- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2780 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2781 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2782 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2783 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2784 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2785 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2786 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2787 to Zack Weinberg!
2788
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002789- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2790 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2791 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2792 type. This has been fixed now.
2793
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002794- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2795 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2796 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2797
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002798- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2799 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2800 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2801 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2802 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2803 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2804 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2805 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002806 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002807
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002808- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2809 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2810 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002811
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002812- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2813 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2814 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2815 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2816 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2817 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2818 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2819 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002820 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002821 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2822 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2823
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002824- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2825 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2826 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2827 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2828 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2829 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2830 this.)
2831
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002832- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2833 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002834 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002835 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002836 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2837 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002838 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2839 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002840
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002841- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2842 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2843 currently running.
2844
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002845- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2846 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2847 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2848 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2849
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002850- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2851 as directory names.
2852
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002853- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2854 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2855
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002856- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2857 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2858
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002859- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002860 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2861 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002862
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002863- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2864 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2865 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2866 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2867 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2868
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002869- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2870 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2871 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2872 removed.
2873
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002874- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2875 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2876 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2877
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002878- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2879 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2880 to __debug__.
2881
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002882- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2883 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2884 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2885
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002886- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2887 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2888 deprecated now.
2889
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002890- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2891 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2892 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002893
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002894- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2895 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2896 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2897 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2898 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002899
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002900- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2901 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2902
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002903- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2904 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2905 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002906 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002907 is backward compatible.
2908
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002909- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2910 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2911 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2912 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2913 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2914
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002915- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2916 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2917 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2918 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2919 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2920 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002921
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002922- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2923 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2924
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002925- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2926 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2927
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002928- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2929 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2930 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2931 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2932 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2933
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002934- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2935 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2936 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2937
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002938- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002939 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2940
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002941- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2942 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2943 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002944
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002945- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2946 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2947
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002948- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2949 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2950 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2951
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002952- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2953
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002954Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002956
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002957- Added three operators to the operator module:
2958 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2959 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2960 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2961
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002962- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2963
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002964- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2965 archives.
2966
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002967- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2968 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2969 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2970
2971 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2972
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002973- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2974 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2975 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002976 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002977
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002978- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2979 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2980 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2981 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002982 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2983 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2984 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2985 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002986
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002987- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2988 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002989
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002990- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2991
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002992- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2993 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2994
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002995- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2996 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2997 supported.
2998
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002999- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3000
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003001- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3002 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003003
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003004- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3005 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3006
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003007- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3008
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003009- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3010 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3011
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003012- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3013 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3014 functions but callable type objects.
3015
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003016- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003017 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003018 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003019
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003020- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3021 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003022
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003023- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3024 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003025
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003026- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3027 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3028 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3029 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3030
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003031- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3032 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003033
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003034- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3035 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3036 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3037 and __imul__.
3038
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003039- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003040 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3041 is called.
3042
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003043- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3044 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3045 interpreter was compiled.
3046
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003047- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3048 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3049 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003050 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003051 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3052 1, not 2.
3053
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003054- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3055 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3056 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3057 limit.
3058
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003059- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3060 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3061 bug #623464.
3062
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003063- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3064 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3065 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3066 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3067
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003068Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003070
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003071- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3072
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003073- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3074 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3075 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3076 with Python 2.3a2.
3077
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003078- os.path exposes getctime.
3079
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003080- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003081 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003082 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003083 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003084 unit tests of floating point results.
3085
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003086- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3087 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3088 has been increased.
3089
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003090- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3091 executed.
3092
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003093- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3094 postinstallation script.
3095
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003096- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3097 test the current module.
3098
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003099- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003100 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3101 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3102 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3103 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3104
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003105- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003106 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003107 Ward's Optik package.
3108
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003109- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3110 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3111 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3112 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3113
3114- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3115 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003116 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003117
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003118- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3119 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3120 shelf are binary pickles.
3121
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003122- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3123 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3124
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003125- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3126 modules are iterators now.
3127
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003128- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3129 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3130 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3131 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3132 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3133 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003134
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003135- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3136 with their entity value.
3137
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003138- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3139
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003140- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3141 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003142
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003143- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3144 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003145 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003146
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003147- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3148 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3149 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3150 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3151 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3152 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3153 main():
3154
3155 import locale
3156 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3157
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003158- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3159 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3160
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003161- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3162 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3163 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3164 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3165 to the new standard.
3166
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003167- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3168 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3169 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3170 an extension to the database.
3171
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003172- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3173 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3174 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3175 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003176 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003177
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003178- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003179 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003180
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003181- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3182 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3183 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3184 bounded integers.
3185
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003186- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3187 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3188 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3189 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3190 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3191 in existence.
3192
3193 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3194 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3195 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3196 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3197 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3198 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3199
3200 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3201 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3202 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3203 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3204
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003205- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3206 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3207 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3208
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003209- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3210
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003211- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3212 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3213 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3214 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3215
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003216- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3217 argument.
3218
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003219- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3220 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3221 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3222 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3223 [SF patch 560794].
3224
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003225- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3226 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3227 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003228 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3229 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3230 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003231
3232- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3233 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003234
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003235- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3236 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3237 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3238 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003239
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003240- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3241 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3242 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3243 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3244 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3245
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003246- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003247
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003248- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3249
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003250- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3251 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3252 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3253 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3254 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3255 identical to None.
3256
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003257- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3258 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3259 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3260 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3261 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3262 results now.
3263
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003264- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3265 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3266
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003267- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3268 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3269 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3270 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3271 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3272 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3273 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3274 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3275
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003276- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3277
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003278- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3279 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3280
3281- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3282 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3283 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3284 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3285 and other systems.
3286
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003287- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3288 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3289 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3290 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 +00003291 work well with these.
3292
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003293- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3294
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003295- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003296 connections.
3297
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003298- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3299 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3300 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3301
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003302- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3303 sets
3304
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003305- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3306 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3307 name.
3308
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003309- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3310 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3311 passed in.
3312
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003313- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003314 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003315 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3316 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003317
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003318- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3319
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003320- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3321
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003322- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3323 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3324 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3325
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003326- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3327 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3328 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3329 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003330 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003331
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003332- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003333 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003334 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003335
3336- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3337 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3338 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3339
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003340- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003341 the value of its expression argument.
3342
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003343- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3344 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3345 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3346
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003347- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3348 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3349 skipstone browser was included.
3350
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003351- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3352 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3353
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003354Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003355-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003356
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003357- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3358 names in addition to accepting file names.
3359
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003360- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3361 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3362 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3363 still used and useful.)
3364
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003365- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3366 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3367 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3368 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003369
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003370- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3371 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3372 the generated binary.
3373
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003374Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003376
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003377- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3378
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003379- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3380 except in the hands of experts.
3381
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003382- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003383 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3384 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3385 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003386
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003387- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3388 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3389 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3390 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3391 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3392 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3393 builds.
3394
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003395- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3396 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3397 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3398 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3399 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3400 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3401 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3402 new type.
3403
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003404- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003405
3406 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3407 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3408 positive infinities.
3409
3410 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3411 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3412 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3413 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3414 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3415 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3416 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3417
3418 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3419
3420 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3421
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003422- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3423 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3424 size of the executable.
3425
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003426- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3427 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3428 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3429 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003430
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003431- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3432
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003433- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3434 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3435 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003436
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003437- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3438 well as Unix.
3439
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003440- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3441 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3442 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3443 modules in the README file for details.
3444
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003445C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003446-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003447
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003448- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3449 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003450 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003451 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003452 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003453
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003454- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3455 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3456 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3457 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3458 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3459 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003460 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003461 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3462 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3463 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3464 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3465 aligned.)
3466
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003467- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3468 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3469 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3470
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003471- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3472 level.
3473
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003474- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3475 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3476 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3477 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3478 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3479
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003480- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3481 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3482 code.
3483
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003484- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3485 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3486 adjusting for negative indices.
3487
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003488- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3489 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3490 object.
3491
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003492- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3493 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3494 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3495
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003496- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3497 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003498
3499- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3500
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003501- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3502 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3503 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3504 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3505
3506- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3507
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003508- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003509
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003510- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003511 without going through the buffer API.
3512
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003514
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003515- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3516 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3517 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3518 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3519
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003520- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3521 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3522
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003523- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003524 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3525
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003526New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003528
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003529- OpenVMS is now supported.
3530
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003531- AtheOS is now supported.
3532
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003533- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3534
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003535- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3536
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003537Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003538-----
3539
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003540- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3541 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3542 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003543
3544Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003546
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003547- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3548 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3549 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3550 bugs.
3551 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003552 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003553 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3554 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003555 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003556
3557- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003558 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003559
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003560- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3561 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3562
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003563- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3564 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003565 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003566 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3567
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003568- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3569 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3570 use files" uninstall option).
3571
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003572- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3573
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003574- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3575 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3576
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003577- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3578 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3579 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3580
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003581- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3582 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3583 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3584 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3585 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003586 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3587 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3588 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003589
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003590- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003591 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003592 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3593 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3594 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3595 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3596 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3597 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3598 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3599 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3600 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3601 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3602 work around.
3603
3604- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3605 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3606 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3607 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3608 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3609 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3610 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3611 specified with O_CREAT too).
3612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003613Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614----
3615
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003616- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003617
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003618- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3619 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3620 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3621
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003622- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3623 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3624 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3625
3626- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3627 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3628 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3629 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3630 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3631 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3632 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3633 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003634
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003635- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3636 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3637 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003638
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003639- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3640 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3641 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3642 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3643 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003644
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003645- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3646 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3647 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003648
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003649- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3650 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003651
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003652- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3653 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3654 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3655 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3656 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003657
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003658- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3659 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3660 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3661
3662- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3663 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3664 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003665
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003666- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3667 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3668 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3669 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003670 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003671
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003672- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3673 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003674
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003675- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3676 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003677
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003678- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003679 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003680 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3681 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003682
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003683
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003684What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003685===============================
3686
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003687*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3688
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003689Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003691
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003692- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3693 with a custom metaclass.
3694
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003695Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003697
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003698- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3699 are proxies.
3700
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003701Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003703
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003704- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3705 very short strings.
3706
3707- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3708 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3709 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3710 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3711 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3712
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003713Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003714-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003715
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003716- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3717 close or delete time).
3718
3719- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3720 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3721
3722- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3723
3724- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003725 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003726
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003727Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003729
3730Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003731-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003732
3733C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003735
3736New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003738
3739Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003741
3742Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003744
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003745- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3746
3747- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3748 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3749
3750- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3751 deleted at process exit time.
3752
3753- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3754 in backslash.
3755
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003756Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003758
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003759- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3760 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3761 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3762
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003763
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003764What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003765===========================
3766
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003767*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3768
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003769Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003771
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003772- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3773 been extensively updated. See
3774
3775 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3776
3777 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3778
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003779- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3780 deleted!
3781
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003782- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3783 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3784 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3785 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3786 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3787
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003788- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3789
3790 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3791 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3792
3793 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3794 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3795 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3796 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3797 supported anyway.
3798
3799 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3800 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3801
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003802- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3803 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3804 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3805 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3806 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003807
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003808- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3809 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3810 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3811
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003812Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003814
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003815- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3816 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3817 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3818 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3819 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3820 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003821 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3822 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3823 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3824 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003825
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003826- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3827 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3828 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3829
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003830Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003832
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003833- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3834
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003835Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003837
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003838- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3839 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3840 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3841 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3842 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3843 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3844
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003845- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3846
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003847- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3848
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003849- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3850
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003851- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3852 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3853 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3854
3855- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3856
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003857Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003859
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003860- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3861 off a search on Google.
3862
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003863Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003865
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003866- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3867 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3868 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3869 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3870 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3871 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3872 other platforms should do likewise.
3873
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003874- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3875 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3876 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3877
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003878C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003880
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003881- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3882 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3883 producing key-value pairs.
3884
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003885- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003886 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003887 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3888 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3889 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3890 previously went unchallenged.
3891
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003892New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003894
3895Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003896-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003897
3898Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003900
3901Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003903
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003904- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3905 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003906
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003907- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3908 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3909 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3910 home.
3911
3912
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003913What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003914===========================
3915
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3917
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003918Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003920
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003921- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3922 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003923
3924 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003925 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003926
3927 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3928 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003929 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003930 This needs to be documented.
3931
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003932- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3933 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3934
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003935- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3936 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3937 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3938
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003939- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3940 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3941
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003942- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3943 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3944 class forbids it).
3945
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003946- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3947 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3948 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3949
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003950- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3951
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003952Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003954
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003955- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3956 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003957 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003958
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003959- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3960 (like 1 + '').
3961
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003962Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003964
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003965- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3966 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3967 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3968 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003969 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003970 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3971
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003972- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3973 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3974 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3975 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3976
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003977- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3978 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003979 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3980 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3981 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003982
3983- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3984 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003985
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003986- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3987 bytes on its input.
3988
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003989Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003991
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003992- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003993 convenience function.
3994
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003995- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3996 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3997 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003998 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3999 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4000 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4001 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4002 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4003 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004004
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004005- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4006 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4007 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4008 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4009
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004010- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4011 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4012 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4013
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004014- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4015 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4016 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4017 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4018
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004019- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4020 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004022 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4023 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4024 new -l and -e options.
4025
4026- statcache is now deprecated.
4027
4028- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4029 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004031 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4032 time properly taken into account.
4033
4034- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4035 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4036 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4037 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4038
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004039Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004041
4042Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004044
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004045- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4046 is built with libdb3 if available.
4047
4048- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4049
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004050C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004052
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004053- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4054 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4055 PySequence_Size().
4056
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004057- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4058
4059- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4060 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4061 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4062
4063- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4064 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4065
4066- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4067 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4068
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004069New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004071
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004072- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4073 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4074
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004075- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4076 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4077
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004078- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4079
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004080Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004082
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004083- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4084 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4085
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004086Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004088
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004089Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004091
4092- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4093 removed completely in the next release.
4094
4095- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4096 OSX.
4097
4098- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4099 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4100
4101- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4102
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004103
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004104What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004105===========================
4106
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4108
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004109Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004111
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004112- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004113 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004114 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004115 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4116 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004117 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4118 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004119 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4120 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004121
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004122- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4123 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4124
4125- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4126 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4127
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004128Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004130
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004131- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4132 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4133 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4134 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4135 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4136 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4137 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4138 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4139
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004140- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4141 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4142 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4143 example).
4144
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004145- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004146 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004147 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004148 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004149
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004150- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4151 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4152 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004153 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004154
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004155- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4156 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4157 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4158 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4159 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4160 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4161
4162 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4163
4164 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4165
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004166Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004168
4169- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4170
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004171- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4172
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004173- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4174 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004175
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004176- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4177 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4178 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4179 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4180 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4181 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004182 attributes.
4183
4184- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4185 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4186 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004187
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004188- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4189 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4190 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004191
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004192- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4193 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4194 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004195 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4196 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4197
4198- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4199 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004200
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004201Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004203
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004204- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4205 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4206
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004207- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4208 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4209 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4210 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4211
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004212- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4213 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4214 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4215 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4216
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004217 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4218 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4219 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4220 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4221 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4222 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4223 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4224 without losing information).
4225
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004226- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004227 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4228 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4229 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4230 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4231 module).
4232
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004233 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004234 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4235 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4236 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4237 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004238
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004239- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004240 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4241 encoding.
4242
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004243- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4244 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4245
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004247 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4248
4249- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4250 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4251 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4252 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4253
4254- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4255
4256- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4257 ON, and OFF.
4258
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004259- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4260 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4261
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004262Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004264
4265- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4266 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4267 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004268
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004269- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4270 been added: -X and -E.
4271
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004272Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004274
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004275- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4276 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4277
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004278C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004280
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004281- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4282 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4283 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4284 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4285 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4286
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004287- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4288 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4289 as long) arguments.
4290
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004291- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4292 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4293 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4294 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4295 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4296 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4297
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004298- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4299 input.
4300
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004301New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004303
4304Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004306
4307Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004309
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004310- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4311 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4312 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4313
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004314- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4315 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4316 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004317 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4320 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4321 import signal
4322 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004323
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004325 while 1:
4326 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004328 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4329 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4330 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4331 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004332
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004333
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004334What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4335===========================
4336
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4338
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004339Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004341
4342- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4343 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4344 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4345
4346- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4347 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4348 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4349 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4350 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4351 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4352 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004353
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004354- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004355 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004356 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4357 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4358 associate a docstring with a property.
4359
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004360- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4361 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4362 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4363 other built-in object types.
4364
4365- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4366 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4367 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4368 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4369 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4370
4371- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4372 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4373
4374- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4375 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004376 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004377 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4378 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4379 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4380 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4381 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4382
4383- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4384 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4385 class.
4386
4387- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4388 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4389 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4390 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4391
4392- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4393 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4394 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4395 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4396
4397- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4398 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4399
4400- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4401 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4402 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4403 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4404 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004405 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004406 with the same value as s.
4407
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004408- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4409
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004410Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004412
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004413- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4414
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004415- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4416 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4417 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4418 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4419 objects.
4420
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004421- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4422 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004423 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4424 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4425
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004426- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4427 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4428 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4429
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004430Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004432
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004433- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4434 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4435 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4436 by the instances.
4437
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004438- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4439 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4440 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4441
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004442- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4443 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4444 before the entire comparison is complete.
4445
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004446- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4447 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4448 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4449
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004450- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4451 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4452 getwriter().
4453
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004454- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4455 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4456
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004457- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004458 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4459 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4460
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004461- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4462 iterable object.
4463
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004464- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4465 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004466
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004467- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4468 authentication.
4469
4470- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4471 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004473- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004474 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4475 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4476 a sample driver.)
4477
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004478Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004480
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004481- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4482 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4483 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4484 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4485 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4486 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4487 kernel has large file support.
4488
4489- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4490 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4491 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4492 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4493 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4494
4495- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4496 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4497 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4498
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004499C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004501
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004502- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4503 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4504
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004505New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004507
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004508- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4509 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4510
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004511Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004513
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004514- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4515 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4516 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4517 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4518 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4519
4520- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4521 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4522 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4523 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4524
4525- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4526 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4527
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004528Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004530
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004531- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004532 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4533 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004534
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004535
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004536What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4537===========================
4538
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4540
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004541Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004543
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004544- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4545 big to represent as a C double.
4546
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004547- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4548 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4549 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4550 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4551 restriction).
4552
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004553- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4554 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4555 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4556 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4557 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4558
4559 >>> dir([])
4560 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4561 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4562 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4563 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4564 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4565 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4566 'reverse', 'sort']
4567
4568 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4569
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004570- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004571 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4572 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4573 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4574 OverflowError exception.
4575
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004576- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004577 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004578 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4579 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4580 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4581 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4582 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004583 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4585 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4586
4587 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4588 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4589 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4590 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004591
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004592- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004593 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4594 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4595 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4596 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4597 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4598 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4599 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4600 once it is created.
4601
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004602- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4603 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4604 (key, value) pairs.
4605
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004606- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004607 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4608 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4609
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004610- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4611 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4612 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4613 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4614 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004615
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004616- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004617 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4618 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4619
4620 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4621
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004622- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004623 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4624
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004625Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004627
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004628- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004629 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4630 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004631
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004632- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4633 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4634 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4635 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4636 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4637 in this area anymore).
4638
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004639- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4640 threading.Timer.
4641
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004642- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4643 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4644
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004645- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004646 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4647
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004648- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004649 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4650 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4651 converted to Python longs.
4652
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004653- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004654 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4655
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004656- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4657 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4658 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4659
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004660Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004662
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004663- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4664 division operators as per PEP 238.
4665
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004666Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004668
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004669- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4670 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4671 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4672 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4673
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004674C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004676
4677- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004678
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004679- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4680 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004681 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004682
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4684 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004685 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004687
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004688- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004689 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4690 module:
4691
4692 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004693
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004694 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4695 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004696
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004697 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4698 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004699
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004700 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4701
4702 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4703
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004704- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004705 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4706 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4707 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004708
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004709New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004711
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004712- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4713 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4714 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4715 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4716 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004717
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004718Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004720
4721Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004723
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004724- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4725 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4726 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4727 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004728 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4729 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4730 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4731 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4732 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004733
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004734- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004735 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4736
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004737
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004738What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4739===========================
4740
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4742
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004743Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004745
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004746- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4747 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4748
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004749- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4750 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4751 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004752
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004753- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4754 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4755 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4756 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004757
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004758- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004761
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004762Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004764
4765- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004766 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004767 the module docstring for details.
4768
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004769Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004771
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004772- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004773 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4774 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4775 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004776
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004777- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4778 Nick Mathewson.
4779
4780Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004782
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004783- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4784 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4785 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4786 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4787 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4788 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4789 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4790 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4791
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004792- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4793 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4794 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4795 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4796
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004797- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4798 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4799 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4800 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4801 come a long way).
4802
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004803- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4804 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4805 write filters for these warnings).
4806
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004807- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4808 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4809 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4810 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4811 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4812
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004813- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4814 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4815 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4816 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4817 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4818 older distribution.
4819
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004820Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004822
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004823- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4824 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004825 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004826
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004827- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4828 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4829 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4830
4831- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4832
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004833- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4834
4835- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4836
4837- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4838
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004840
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004841- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4842
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004843New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004845
4846C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004848
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004849- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4850 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4851 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4852 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4853 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4854 against buffer overruns.
4855
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004856- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004857 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4858 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004859 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4860 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4861 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4862
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004863- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4864 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4865 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4866 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4867 deprecated.
4868
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004869Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004871
4872- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4873 relevant is found.
4874
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004875
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004876What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004877===========================
4878
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4880
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004881Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004883
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004884- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4885 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4886 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4887 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4888 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4889 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4890 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4891 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004892 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004893 repaired.
4894
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004895- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004896 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004897 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4898 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4899 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4900 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4901 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4902 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4903 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4904 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4905
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004906- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4907 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4908 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4909 leading BMO character).
4910
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004911- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4912 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4913 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4914
4915 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4916 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4917 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004918
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004919 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4920 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4921 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4922 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4923 for various simple to use conversions.
4924
4925 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4926 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4927
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004928 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4929 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4930 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4931 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4932 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4933 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4934 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4935 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4936 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4937 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4938 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4939 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4940 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4941 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4942 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004943
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004944- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4945 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4946 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004947 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004948 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004949
4950 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004951 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4952 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4953 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4954 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4955 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004956 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4957 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004958
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004959 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4960 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4961 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004962 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004963
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004964- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4965 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4966 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4967 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4968 floating arithmetic,
4969
4970 x = 9007199254740992.0
4971 print long(x)
4972
4973 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4974 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4975 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4976 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4977 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4978 functions are of good quality).
4979
4980 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4981 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4982 algorithms to break.
4983
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004984- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4985 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4986 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4987 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4988 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4989 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4990 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4991 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4992 order.
4993
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004994- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4995 operation along the most common code paths.
4996
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004997- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4998 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4999
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005000- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5001 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5002 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5003 {}.update(UserDict())
5004
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005005- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5006 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5007 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5008 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5009 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5010 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5011 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5012 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5013
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005014- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005015 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005017 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005018 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5019 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005020 join() method of strings
5021 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005022 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5023 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005025 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005026
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005027- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5028 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5029
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005030- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5031 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5032
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005033- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5034 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5035 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5036 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5037
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005038- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5039 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005040 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005041 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5042 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005043
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005044- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5045
5046
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005047Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005049
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005050- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005051 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005052 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5053 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5054
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005055- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5056 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5057
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005058- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5059 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5060 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5061 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5062
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005063- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5064 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5065 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5066
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005067- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5068
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005069- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5070
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005071- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5072 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5073 that are still imported into string.py).
5074
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005075- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5076
5077- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5078 Now it does.
5079
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005080- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5081
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005082- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5083 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5084 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5085 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5086 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005087 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5088 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005089
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005090- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5091 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5092 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5093 'help(object)'.
5094
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005095Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005097
5098- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005099 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005100 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5101 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5102
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005103- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005104 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5105 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005106
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005107C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005108-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005109
5110- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5111 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005112
5113----
5114
5115**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**