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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000015- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
16
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000017- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
18 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
19 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
20 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
21 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
22 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
23 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
24 records with equal keys is unchanged).
25
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000026- Added a list.copysort() method that returns a copy of the sorted list
27 while leaving the original intact.
28
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000029- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
30 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
31 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
32
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000033- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
34 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
35 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
36 freelist.
37
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000038- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
39 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
40
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000041- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
42 number.
43
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000044- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
45 a TypeError exception.
46
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000047- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
48 820195.
49
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000050- builtin_sum() now uses PyNumber_InPlaceAdd, fixing a previous
51 performance bug for sum(list_of_lists) and similar cases.
52
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000053Extension modules
54-----------------
55
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +000056- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
57 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
58 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
59
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +000060- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
61
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000062- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
63
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000064- readline.clear_history was added.
65
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000066- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
67
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000068- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
69
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000070- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
71
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000072- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
73
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000074- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
75
76- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
77
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +000078- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
79
80- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
81
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +000082- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
83 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
84 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
85
86- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
87 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
88 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
89 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
90 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
91 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
92 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
93
94- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
95 iterators from a single iterable.
96
97- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
98 of raising a TypeError exception.
99
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000100Library
101-------
102
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000103- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
104
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000105- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
106
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000107- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
108 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
109 list of fieldnames.
110
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000111- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
112 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
113
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000114- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
115
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000116- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
117 empty lists.
118
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000119- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
120 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
121 and shelves.
122
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000123- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
124 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
125
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000126- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000127 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
128 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000129
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000130- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
131 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
132 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
133 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000134
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000135- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000136 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
137 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
138
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000139- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
140 and removed in Py2.4.
141
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000142Tools/Demos
143-----------
144
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000145- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
146 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
147 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
148 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
149
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000150- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
151
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000152- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
153 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
154 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
155 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
156 now.
157
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000158- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
159 in effect
160
161- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
162 C-c C-h
163
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000164- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
165 -d option was given.
166
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000167Build
168-----
169
170C API
171-----
172
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000173- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
174 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
175
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000176- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
177 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
178 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
179 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
180
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000181New platforms
182-------------
183
184Tests
185-----
186
187Windows
188-------
189
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000190- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
191 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
192 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
193
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000194Mac
195----
196
197
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000198What's New in Python 2.3 final?
199===============================
200
201*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
202
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000203IDLE
204----
205
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000206- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
207 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
208 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
209 context-menu actions.
210
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000211- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
212 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
213 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
214 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
215 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
216 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
217 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
218 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
219 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
220
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000221
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000222What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
223=============================================
224
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000225*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000226
227Core and builtins
228-----------------
229
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000230- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000231 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000232 comment at the end are still unsupported.
233
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000234Extension modules
235-----------------
236
237- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
238 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
239 than once. This has been fixed.
240
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000241- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
242 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
243 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
244 call.
245
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000246- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
247
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000248Library
249-------
250
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000251- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
252 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
253
254- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
255 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
256 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
257 restored.
258
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000259IDLE
260----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000261
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000262- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000263
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000264Build
265-----
266
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000267- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
268 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
269
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000270C API
271-----
272
273Windows
274-------
275
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000276- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
277 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
278
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000279- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
280
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000281Mac
282---
283
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000284- Various fixes to pimp.
285
286- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
287
288- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
289 more problems than it solves.
290
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000291
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000292What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
293=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000294
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000295*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
296
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000297Core and builtins
298-----------------
299
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000300- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
301 by sys.setcheckinterval().
302
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000303- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
304 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000305 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000306
307- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
308 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
309 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000310 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000311
312- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
313 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000314
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000315- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
316 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
317 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
318
319- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000320 770247.
321
322- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000323
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000324Extension modules
325-----------------
326
327- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
328 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
329
330- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
331
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000332- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
333
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000334- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
335 contained within the _strptime module.
336
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000337- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
338 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
339
340- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000341 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
342
343- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
344 the find_class attribute, if present.
345
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000346- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000347
348 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
349 (SF bug 763298).
350
351 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000352 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
353 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
354 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000355
356 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
357
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000358Library
359-------
360
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000361- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
362
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000363- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
364 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
365 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
366 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
367 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
368 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
369 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
370 or Tester().
371
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000372- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
373 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
374 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
375 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
376 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
377 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
378 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
379 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
380 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000381
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000382 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000383
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000384- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
385 weren't before was an oversight.
386
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000387- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
388 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
389
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000390- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
391 when there are no lines.
392
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000393- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
394 which could occur with Tk 8.4
395
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000396- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
397 to child processes.
398
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000399- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
400
401- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
402
403- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
404 xmlrpclib.
405
406- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
407 responses.
408
409- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
410 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
411
412- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
413 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
414 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
415
416- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
417 used as patterns.
418
419- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
420 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
421 than Tk 8.3.
422
423- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
424
425- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000426
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000427Tools/Demos
428-----------
429
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000430- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
431
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000432- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
433
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000434- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000435
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000436Build
437-----
438
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000439- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
440
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000441- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
442
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000443- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
444 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000445
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000446- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
447 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
448 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000449
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000450C API
451-----
452
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000453- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
454 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
455
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000456Windows
457-------
458
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000459- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
460 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
461 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
462 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
463 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
464 Python exception ::
465
466 thread.error: can't start new thread
467
468 is raised now.
469
470- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
471 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
472 instead of from DLL teardown.
473
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000474Mac
475---
476
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000477- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000478 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000479 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
480 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
481 the executable in the bundle.
482
483- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000484
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000485- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
486
487- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
488 on Panther.
489
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000490What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
491================================
492
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000493*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000494
495Core and builtins
496-----------------
497
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000498- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
499 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
500 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
501 with the -i option.
502
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000503- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
504 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
505
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000506- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
507 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
508
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000509- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
510 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
511 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
512 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
513 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
514 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
515 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
516 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
517 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
518 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
519 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
520 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
521 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000522
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000523- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
524 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
525 embedded in a lambda expression.
526
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000527- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
528 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
529 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
530 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
531 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
532
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000533- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
534 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
535 matches the restriction on classic classes.
536
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000537- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
538 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
539
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000540- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
541 It's writable again.
542
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000543- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
544 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
545 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000546 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000547
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000548- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
549 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
550 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
551
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000552Extension modules
553-----------------
554
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000555- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
556 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
557
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000558- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
559 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
560 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
561 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
562
563- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
564 collection.
565
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000566- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
567 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
568 unique within a single program run.
569
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000570- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
571 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
572
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000573- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
574 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
575
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000576- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
577 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000578
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000579- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
580
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000581- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
582 Fixes SF bug #730685.
583
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000584- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
585 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
586 for many BSD-derived systems.
587
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000588
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000589Library
590-------
591
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000592- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
593 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
594 primary ones:
595
596 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
597 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
598 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
599
600 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
601 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
602 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
603 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
604 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
605 framework features (which doctest lacks).
606
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000607- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
608 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
609 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
610 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
611 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
612 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
613 argument.
614
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000615- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
616 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
617 in the archive.
618
619- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
620 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
621
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000622- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
623 569574).
624
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000625- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
626 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
627 no more.
628
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000629- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
630 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
631 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
632 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
633 code coverage.
634
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000635- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
636 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
637 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000638 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
639 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000640
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000641- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
642 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
643 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000644 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000645
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000646- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
647
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000648- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
649 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
650 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
651 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
652
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000653- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
654 handling.
655
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000656- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
657 __doc__ of data descriptors.
658
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000659- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
660 in socket.py.
661
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000662- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
663
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000664- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
665 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
666 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
667 opener with proxy support.
668
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000669- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
670
671- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
672
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000673Tools/Demos
674-----------
675
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000676- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
677
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000678- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
679
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000680- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
681 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000682
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000683- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
684 files.
685
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000686Build
687-----
688
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000689- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000690 different root directory.
691
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000692C API
693-----
694
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000695- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
696 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
697 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
698 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
699 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
700 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
701 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
702 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
703 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
704 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
705
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000706- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
707 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
708 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
709 from Python.
710
711
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000712New platforms
713-------------
714
715None this time.
716
717Tests
718-----
719
720- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
721 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
722
723Windows
724-------
725
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000726- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
727
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000728- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
729 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
730 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
731 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
732 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
733 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
734 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
735 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
736 that's what it's for.
737
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000738Mac
739---
740
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000741- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
742 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
743 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
744 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000745- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
746 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
747- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000748
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000749SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
750------------------------------------
751
752430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
753598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
754622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
755661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
756683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
757697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
758713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
759724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
760727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
761729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
762730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
763731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
764732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
765733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
766735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
767740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
768744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
769745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
770747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
771749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
772751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
773753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
774755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
775757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
776760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
777
778
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000779What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
780================================
781
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000782*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000783
784Core and builtins
785-----------------
786
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000787- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
788 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
789
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000790- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
791 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
792 and cannot be strings).
793
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000794- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
795 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
796 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
797 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
798
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000799- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
800 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
801 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
802 Python itself.
803
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000804- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
805 the referenced object, if it has one.
806
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000807- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
808 the thread started at
809 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
810
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000811- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
812 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
813 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
814 placed on a list index.
815
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000816- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
817 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
818 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
819 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
820
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000821- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
822 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
823 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
824 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
825 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
826 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
827 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
828
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000829- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
830 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
831 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
832 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
833 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
834
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000835- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
836 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000837
838- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
839 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
840 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
841 #693195.)
842
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000843- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
844 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000845
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000846- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000847 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000848 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
849 interpreter executions, would fail.
850
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000851- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000852 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000853 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000854
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000855Extension modules
856-----------------
857
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000858- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
859 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
860 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
861 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
862
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000863- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
864 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
865
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000866- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
867 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
868 and Greg Chapman.)
869
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000870- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
871 recursively.
872
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000873- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000874 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
875 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
876 leaks.
877
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000878- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
879
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000880- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
881 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
882 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
883 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
884 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
885 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
886 #705836.
887
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000888- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000889 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
890
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000891- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
892 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
893 See SF bug #692416.
894
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000895- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
896 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
897
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000898- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
899 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
900 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000901
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000902- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000903 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
904 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
905
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000906- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
907 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
908 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
909 timeouts to work properly.
910
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000911Library
912-------
913
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000914- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
915 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
916 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
917 future release.
918
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000919- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
920 for querying platform dependent features.
921
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000922- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000923
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000924- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
925 pickle protocol versions.
926
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000927- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
928 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
929 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
930
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000931- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
932
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000933- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
934 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
935 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
936 modules.
937
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000938- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
939 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
940 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
941
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000942- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
943 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
944
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000945- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
946 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
947 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
948
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000949- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000950 MS Office extensions.
951
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000952- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
953 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
954
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000955- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
956 execution speed of expressions and statements.
957
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000958- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
959 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
960 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
961 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
962 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
963 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
964
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000965- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
966 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
967 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000968
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000969- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
970 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
971 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
972
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000973- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
974
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000975- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
976 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
977 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
978
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000979Tools/Demos
980-----------
981
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000982- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
983 See the module docstring for details.
984
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000985Build
986-----
987
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000988- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
989 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000990
991C API
992-----
993
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000994- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
995
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000996- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
997 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
998 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
999
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001000- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1001 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001002
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001003 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1004 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1005 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001006
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001007- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001008 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1009
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001010- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1011 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1012 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001013
1014New platforms
1015-------------
1016
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001017None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001018
1019Tests
1020-----
1021
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001022- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1023 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001024
1025Windows
1026-------
1027
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001028- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1029 function.
1030
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001031- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1032 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001033
1034Mac
1035---
1036
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001037- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1038 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001039
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001040- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1041 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001042
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001043- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1044 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1045 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001046
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001047- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001048 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1049 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001050
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001051- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1052 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001053
1054
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001055What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1056=================================
1057
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001058*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001059
1060Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001061-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001062
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001063- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1064 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1065 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1066
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001067- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1068 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1069 (SF patch #664376.)
1070
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001071- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1072 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1073 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1074 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1075 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1076 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001077 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001078
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001079- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1080 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1081 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1082 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001083 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001084
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001085- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1086 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1087 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1088 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1089 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1090 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1091 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1092 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1093 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1094 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1095 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1096
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001097- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1098 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1099 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1100 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1101 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1102 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1103
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001104- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1105 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1106
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001107- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1108 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1109 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1110 case.)
1111
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001112- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1113 passed as unicode strings.
1114
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001115- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1116 See SF bug #683467.
1117
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001118- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1119 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1120
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001121- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1122
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001123- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1124
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001125- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1126 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1127 arguments.
1128
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001129- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1130 See SF bug #667147.
1131
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001132- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001133 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001134 See SF bug #676155.
1135
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001136- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001137 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001138 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1139 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1140 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1141 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1142 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1143 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001144
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001145Extension modules
1146-----------------
1147
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001148- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1149 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1150 tp_as_number pointer.
1151
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001152- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1153 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1154 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1155 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1156 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1157
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001158- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1159
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001160- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1161
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001162- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001163 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001164 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1165 patch #678531.)
1166
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001167- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1168 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1169
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001170- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1171 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1172
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001173- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1174
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001175- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1176 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1177 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1178
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001179- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1180
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001181- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1182 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1183
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001184- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001185
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001186- datetime changes:
1187
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001188 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1189
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001190 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1191 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1192 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1193 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1194 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1195 now.
1196
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001197 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001198 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1199 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001200
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001201 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001202 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001203 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1204 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1205 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1206 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001207
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001208 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1209 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1210 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001211 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1212
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001213 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1214 by a later example coded by Guido.
1215
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001216 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001217 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1218 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1219 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001220 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1221 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1222
1223 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1224 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1225 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1226 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1227 tzinfo subclass instance.
1228
1229 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1230 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1231 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1232 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1233 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1234 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1235 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1236 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001237
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001238 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1239 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1240 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1241 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1242 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001243 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1244
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001245 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001246
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001247 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1248 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1249 as a naive datetime object.
1250
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001251 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1252 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1253 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1254
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001255 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1256 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1257 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1258 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1259 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1260 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1261 comparison.
1262
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001263 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1264 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1265 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1266 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001267 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001268
1269 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001270
1271 and ::
1272
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001273 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1274
1275 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1276 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1277 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1278 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1279
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001280 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1281 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1282 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1283 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1284 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1285
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001286 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1287 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001288 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1289 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001290
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001291Library
1292-------
1293
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001294- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1295 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1296
1297- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1298 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1299 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1300 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1301 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1302 See PEP 307 for details.
1303
1304- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1305 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1306
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001307- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1308 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001309 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001310 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1311 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001312 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001313
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001314- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1315 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1316
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001317- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1318 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1319 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1320
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001321- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1322
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001323- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1324 exception.
1325
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001326- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1327 class.
1328
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001329- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1330 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1331 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1332
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001333- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1334 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1335
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001336- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001337 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1338 See SF bug #659228.
1339
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001340- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1341 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1342 See SF patch #651082.
1343
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001344- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001345
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001346- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1347 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1348
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001349- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001350 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001351
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001352- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1353 DOS paths from other platforms.
1354
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001355Tools/Demos
1356-----------
1357
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001358- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1359 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1360 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1361 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1362 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1363 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1364 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1365 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1366 example:
1367
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001368 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1369 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001370
1371 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1372
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001373
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001374Build
1375-----
1376
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001377- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1378 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1379 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001380 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1381
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001382 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1383
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001384- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1385 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1386 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1387 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1388 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1389 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1390 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1391 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1392 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1393
1394- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1395 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1396 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1397 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1398
1399- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1400 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1401
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001402C API
1403-----
1404
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001405- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1406 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001407
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001408- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1409 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1410 tp_as_number pointer.
1411
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001412- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1413 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1414 (SF #681367)
1415
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001416- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1417 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1418 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1419 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001420
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001421Tests
1422-----
1423
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001424- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001425 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1426 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1427 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1428 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1429 pydoc.)
1430
1431- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1432
1433- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001434
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001435Windows
1436-------
1437
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001438- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1439 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1440 time).
1441
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001442- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1443 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1444
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001445- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1446 release without strong cryptography.
1447
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001448- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001449 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001450
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001451- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1452 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1453
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001454Mac
1455---
1456
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001457- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1458 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001459
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001460- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1461 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1462 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001463
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001464- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1465 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001466
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001467- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1468 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1469 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1470 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001471
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001472- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001473 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1474 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1475 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001476
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001477
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001478What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001479=================================
1480
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001481*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001482
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001483Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001484--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001485
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001486- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1487
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001488- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1489 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001490 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001491 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001492 a different meaning than before.
1493
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001494- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001495 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001496 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001497
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001498- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001499 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001500 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001501
1502- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1503 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1504 and deallocation.
1505
1506- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1507 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1508
1509- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1510 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1511 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1512 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1513 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1514
1515- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1516 now detected by the garbage collector.
1517
1518- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1519 [SF bug 519621]
1520
1521- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1522 identifier.
1523
1524- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1525 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1526 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1527 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1528 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1529 [SF bug 563060]
1530
1531- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1532 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1533 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1534 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1535 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1536
1537- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1538 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1539 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1540
1541- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1542
1543- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1544 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1545 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1546 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1547 state of the slots would be lost.)
1548
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001549Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001550-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001551
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001552- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001553 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1554 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1555 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1556 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001557 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1558 Jython 2.1.
1559
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001560- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001561 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001562 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1563 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1564 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1565 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1566 these, see PEP 302.
1567
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001568- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1569 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1570 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1571
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001572- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1573 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1574 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1575
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001576- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1577 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1578 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1579
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001580- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1581 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1582 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1583 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1584 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1585 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1586 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1587 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1588 releases or implementations.
1589
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001590- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001591 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1592 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001593
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001594- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1595 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1596
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001597- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1598 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1599 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1600
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001601- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1602 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1603
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001604- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1605 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001606 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1607 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001608
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001609- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1610 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1611 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1612 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1613 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1614
1615 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1616 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1617 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1618 pattern.
1619
1620 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1621 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1622 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1623 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1624
1625 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1626 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1627 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1628 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1629 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1630 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1631
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001632- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1633 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1634 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1635 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1636 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1637 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1638 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1639 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001640
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001641- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1642 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1643 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1644 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1645 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001646 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1647 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1648 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1649 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1650 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1651 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1652 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001653
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001654- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1655 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1656
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001657- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1658 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1659 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1660 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1661 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1662 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1663 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1664 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1665 to Zack Weinberg!
1666
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001667- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1668 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1669 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1670 type. This has been fixed now.
1671
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001672- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1673 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1674 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1675
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001676- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1677 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1678 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1679 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1680 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1681 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1682 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1683 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001684 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001685
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001686- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1687 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1688 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001689
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001690- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1691 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1692 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1693 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1694 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1695 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1696 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1697 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001698 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001699 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1700 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1701
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001702- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1703 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1704 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1705 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1706 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1707 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1708 this.)
1709
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001710- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1711 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001712 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001713 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001714 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1715 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001716 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1717 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001718
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001719- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1720 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1721 currently running.
1722
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001723- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1724 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1725 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1726 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1727
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001728- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1729 as directory names.
1730
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001731- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1732 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1733
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001734- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1735 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1736
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001737- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001738 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1739 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001740
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001741- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1742 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1743 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1744 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1745 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1746
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001747- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1748 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1749 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1750 removed.
1751
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001752- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1753 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1754 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1755
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001756- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1757 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1758 to __debug__.
1759
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001760- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1761 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1762 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1763
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001764- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1765 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1766 deprecated now.
1767
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001768- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1769 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1770 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001771
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001772- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1773 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1774 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1775 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1776 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001777
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001778- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1779 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1780
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001781- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1782 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1783 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001784 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001785 is backward compatible.
1786
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001787- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1788 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1789 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1790 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1791 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1792
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001793- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1794 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1795 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1796 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1797 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1798 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001799
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001800- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1801 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1802
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001803- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1804 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1805
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001806- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1807 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1808 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1809 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1810 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1811
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001812- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1813 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1814 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1815
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001816- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001817 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1818
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001819- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1820 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1821 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001822
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001823- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1824 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1825
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001826- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1827 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1828 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1829
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001830- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1831
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001832Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001833-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001834
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001835- Added three operators to the operator module:
1836 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1837 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1838 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1839
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001840- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1841
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001842- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1843 archives.
1844
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001845- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1846 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1847 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1848
1849 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1850
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001851- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1852 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1853 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001854 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001855
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001856- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1857 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1858 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1859 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001860 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1861 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1862 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1863 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001864
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001865- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1866 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001867
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001868- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1869
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001870- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1871 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1872
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001873- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1874 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1875 supported.
1876
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001877- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1878
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001879- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1880 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001881
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001882- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1883 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1884
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001885- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1886
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001887- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1888 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1889
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001890- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1891 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1892 functions but callable type objects.
1893
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001894- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001895 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001896 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001897
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001898- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1899 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001900
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001901- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1902 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001903
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001904- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1905 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1906 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1907 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1908
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001909- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1910 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001911
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001912- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1913 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1914 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1915 and __imul__.
1916
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001917- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001918 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1919 is called.
1920
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001921- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1922 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1923 interpreter was compiled.
1924
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001925- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1926 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1927 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001928 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001929 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1930 1, not 2.
1931
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001932- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1933 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1934 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1935 limit.
1936
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001937- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1938 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1939 bug #623464.
1940
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001941- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1942 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1943 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1944 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1945
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001946Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001947-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001948
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001949- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1950
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001951- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1952 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1953 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1954 with Python 2.3a2.
1955
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001956- os.path exposes getctime.
1957
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001958- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001959 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001960 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001961 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001962 unit tests of floating point results.
1963
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001964- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1965 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1966 has been increased.
1967
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001968- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1969 executed.
1970
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001971- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1972 postinstallation script.
1973
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001974- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1975 test the current module.
1976
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001977- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001978 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1979 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1980 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1981 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1982
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001983- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001984 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001985 Ward's Optik package.
1986
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001987- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1988 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1989 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1990 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1991
1992- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1993 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001994 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001995
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001996- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1997 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1998 shelf are binary pickles.
1999
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002000- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2001 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2002
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002003- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2004 modules are iterators now.
2005
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002006- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2007 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2008 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2009 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2010 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2011 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002012
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002013- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2014 with their entity value.
2015
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002016- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2017
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002018- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2019 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002020
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002021- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2022 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002023 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002024
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002025- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2026 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2027 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2028 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2029 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2030 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2031 main():
2032
2033 import locale
2034 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2035
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002036- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2037 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2038
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002039- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2040 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2041 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2042 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2043 to the new standard.
2044
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002045- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2046 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2047 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2048 an extension to the database.
2049
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002050- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2051 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2052 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2053 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002054 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002055
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002056- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002057 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002058
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002059- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2060 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2061 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2062 bounded integers.
2063
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002064- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2065 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2066 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2067 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2068 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2069 in existence.
2070
2071 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2072 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2073 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2074 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2075 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2076 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2077
2078 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2079 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2080 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2081 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2082
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002083- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2084 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2085 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2086
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002087- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2088
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002089- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2090 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2091 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2092 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2093
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002094- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2095 argument.
2096
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002097- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2098 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2099 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2100 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2101 [SF patch 560794].
2102
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002103- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2104 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2105 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002106 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2107 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2108 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002109
2110- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2111 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002112
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002113- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2114 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2115 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2116 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002117
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002118- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2119 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2120 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2121 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2122 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2123
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002124- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002125
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002126- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2127
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002128- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2129 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2130 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2131 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2132 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2133 identical to None.
2134
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002135- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2136 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2137 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2138 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2139 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2140 results now.
2141
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002142- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2143 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2144
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002145- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2146 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2147 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2148 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2149 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2150 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2151 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2152 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2153
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002154- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2155
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002156- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2157 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2158
2159- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2160 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2161 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2162 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2163 and other systems.
2164
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002165- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2166 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2167 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2168 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 +00002169 work well with these.
2170
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002171- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2172
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002173- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002174 connections.
2175
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002176- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2177 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2178 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2179
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002180- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2181 sets
2182
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002183- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2184 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2185 name.
2186
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002187- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2188 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2189 passed in.
2190
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002191- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002192 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002193 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2194 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002195
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002196- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2197
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002198- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2199
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002200- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2201 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2202 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2203
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002204- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2205 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2206 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2207 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002208 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002209
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002210- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002211 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002212 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002213
2214- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2215 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2216 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2217
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002218- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002219 the value of its expression argument.
2220
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002221- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2222 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2223 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2224
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002225- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2226 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2227 skipstone browser was included.
2228
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002229- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2230 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2231
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002232Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002233-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002234
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002235- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2236 names in addition to accepting file names.
2237
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002238- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2239 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2240 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2241 still used and useful.)
2242
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002243- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2244 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2245 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2246 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002247
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002248- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2249 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2250 the generated binary.
2251
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002252Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002253-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002254
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002255- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2256
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002257- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2258 except in the hands of experts.
2259
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002260- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002261 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2262 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2263 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002264
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002265- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2266 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2267 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2268 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2269 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2270 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2271 builds.
2272
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002273- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2274 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2275 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2276 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2277 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2278 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2279 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2280 new type.
2281
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002282- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002283
2284 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2285 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2286 positive infinities.
2287
2288 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2289 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2290 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2291 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2292 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2293 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2294 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2295
2296 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2297
2298 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2299
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002300- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2301 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2302 size of the executable.
2303
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002304- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2305 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2306 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2307 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002308
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002309- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2310
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002311- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2312 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2313 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002314
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002315- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2316 well as Unix.
2317
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002318- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2319 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2320 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2321 modules in the README file for details.
2322
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002323C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002324-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002325
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002326- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2327 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002328 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002329 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002330 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002331
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002332- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2333 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2334 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2335 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2336 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2337 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002338 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002339 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2340 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2341 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2342 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2343 aligned.)
2344
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002345- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2346 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2347 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2348
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002349- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2350 level.
2351
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002352- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2353 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2354 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2355 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2356 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2357
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002358- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2359 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2360 code.
2361
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002362- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2363 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2364 adjusting for negative indices.
2365
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002366- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2367 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2368 object.
2369
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002370- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2371 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2372 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2373
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002374- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2375 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002376
2377- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2378
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002379- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2380 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2381 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2382 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2383
2384- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2385
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002386- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002387
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002388- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002389 without going through the buffer API.
2390
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002391- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002392
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002393- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2394 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2395 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2396 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2397
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002398- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2399 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2400
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002401- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002402 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2403
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002404New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002405-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002406
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002407- OpenVMS is now supported.
2408
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002409- AtheOS is now supported.
2410
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002411- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2412
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002413- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2414
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002415Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002416-----
2417
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002418- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2419 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2420 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002421
2422Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002423-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002424
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002425- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2426 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2427 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2428 bugs.
2429 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002430 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002431 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2432 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002433 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002434
2435- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002436 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002437
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002438- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2439 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2440
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002441- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2442 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002443 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002444 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2445
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002446- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2447 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2448 use files" uninstall option).
2449
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002450- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2451
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002452- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2453 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2454
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002455- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2456 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2457 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2458
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002459- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2460 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2461 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2462 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2463 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002464 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2465 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2466 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002467
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002468- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002469 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002470 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2471 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2472 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2473 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2474 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2475 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2476 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2477 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2478 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2479 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2480 work around.
2481
2482- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2483 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2484 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2485 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2486 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2487 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2488 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2489 specified with O_CREAT too).
2490
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002491Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002492----
2493
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002494- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002495
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002496- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2497 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2498 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2499
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002500- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2501 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2502 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2503
2504- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2505 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2506 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2507 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2508 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2509 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2510 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2511 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002512
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002513- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2514 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2515 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002516
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002517- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2518 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2519 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2520 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2521 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002522
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002523- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2524 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2525 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002526
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002527- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2528 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002529
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002530- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2531 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2532 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2533 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2534 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002535
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002536- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2537 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2538 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2539
2540- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2541 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2542 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002543
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002544- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2545 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2546 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2547 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002548 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002549
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002550- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2551 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002552
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002553- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2554 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002555
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002556- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002557 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002558 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2559 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002560
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002561
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002562What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002563===============================
2564
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002565*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2566
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002567Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002568--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002569
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002570- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2571 with a custom metaclass.
2572
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002573Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002574-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002575
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002576- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2577 are proxies.
2578
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002579Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002580-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002581
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002582- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2583 very short strings.
2584
2585- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2586 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2587 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2588 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2589 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2590
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002591Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002592-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002593
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002594- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2595 close or delete time).
2596
2597- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2598 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2599
2600- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2601
2602- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002603 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002604
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002605Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002607
2608Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002609-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002610
2611C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002612-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002613
2614New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002615-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002616
2617Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002619
2620Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002621-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002622
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002623- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2624
2625- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2626 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2627
2628- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2629 deleted at process exit time.
2630
2631- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2632 in backslash.
2633
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002634Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002635----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002636
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002637- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2638 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2639 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2640
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002641
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002642What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002643===========================
2644
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002645*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2646
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002647Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002649
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002650- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2651 been extensively updated. See
2652
2653 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2654
2655 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2656
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002657- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2658 deleted!
2659
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002660- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2661 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2662 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2663 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2664 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2665
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002666- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2667
2668 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2669 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2670
2671 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2672 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2673 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2674 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2675 supported anyway.
2676
2677 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2678 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2679
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002680- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2681 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2682 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2683 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2684 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002685
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002686- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2687 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2688 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2689
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002690Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002691-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002692
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002693- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2694 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2695 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2696 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2697 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2698 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002699 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2700 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2701 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2702 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002703
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002704- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2705 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2706 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2707
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002708Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002709-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002710
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002711- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2712
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002713Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002714-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002715
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002716- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2717 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2718 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2719 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2720 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2721 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2722
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002723- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2724
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002725- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2726
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002727- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2728
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002729- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2730 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2731 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2732
2733- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2734
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002735Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002736-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002737
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002738- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2739 off a search on Google.
2740
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002741Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002742-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002743
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002744- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2745 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2746 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2747 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2748 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2749 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2750 other platforms should do likewise.
2751
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002752- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2753 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2754 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2755
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002756C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002757-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002758
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002759- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2760 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2761 producing key-value pairs.
2762
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002763- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002764 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002765 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2766 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2767 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2768 previously went unchallenged.
2769
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002770New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002771-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002772
2773Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002775
2776Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002777-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002778
2779Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002780----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002781
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002782- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2783 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002784
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002785- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2786 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2787 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2788 home.
2789
2790
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002791What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002792===========================
2793
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2795
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002796Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002797--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002798
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002799- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2800 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002801
2802 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002803 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002804
2805 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2806 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002807 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002808 This needs to be documented.
2809
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002810- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2811 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2812
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002813- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2814 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2815 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2816
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002817- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2818 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2819
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002820- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2821 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2822 class forbids it).
2823
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002824- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2825 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2826 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2827
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002828- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2829
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002830Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002832
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002833- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2834 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002835 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002836
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002837- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2838 (like 1 + '').
2839
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002840Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002841-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002842
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002843- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2844 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2845 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2846 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002847 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002848 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2849
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002850- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2851 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2852 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2853 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2854
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002855- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2856 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002857 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2858 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2859 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002860
2861- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2862 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002863
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002864- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2865 bytes on its input.
2866
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002867Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002869
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002870- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002871 convenience function.
2872
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002873- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2874 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2875 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002876 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2877 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2878 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2879 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2880 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2881 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002882
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002883- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2884 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2885 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2886 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2887
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002888- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2889 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2890 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2891
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002892- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2893 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2894 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2895 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2896
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002897- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2898 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002899 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002900 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2901 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2902 new -l and -e options.
2903
2904- statcache is now deprecated.
2905
2906- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2907 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002908 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002909 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2910 time properly taken into account.
2911
2912- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2913 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2914 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2915 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2916
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002917Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002918-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002919
2920Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002921-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002922
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002923- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2924 is built with libdb3 if available.
2925
2926- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2927
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002928C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002929-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002930
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002931- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2932 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2933 PySequence_Size().
2934
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002935- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2936
2937- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2938 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2939 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2940
2941- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2942 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2943
2944- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2945 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2946
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002947New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002949
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002950- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2951 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2952
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002953- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2954 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2955
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002956- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2957
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002958Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002959-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002960
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002961- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2962 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2963
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002964Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002965-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002966
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002967Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002968----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002969
2970- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2971 removed completely in the next release.
2972
2973- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2974 OSX.
2975
2976- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2977 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2978
2979- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002981
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002982What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002983===========================
2984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2986
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002987Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002989
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002990- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002991 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002992 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002993 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2994 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002995 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2996 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002997 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2998 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002999
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003000- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3001 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3002
3003- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3004 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3005
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003006Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003008
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003009- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3010 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3011 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3012 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3013 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3014 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3015 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3016 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3017
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003018- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3019 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3020 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3021 example).
3022
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003023- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003024 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003025 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003026 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003027
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003028- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3029 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3030 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003031 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003032
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003033- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3034 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3035 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3036 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3037 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3038 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3039
3040 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3041
3042 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3043
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003044Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003045-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003046
3047- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3048
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003049- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3050
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003051- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3052 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003053
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003054- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3055 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3056 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3057 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3058 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3059 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003060 attributes.
3061
3062- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3063 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3064 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003065
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003066- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3067 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3068 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003069
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003070- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3071 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3072 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003073 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3074 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3075
3076- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3077 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003078
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003079Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003081
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003082- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3083 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3084
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003085- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3086 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3087 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3088 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3089
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003090- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3091 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3092 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3093 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3094
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003095 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3096 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3097 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3098 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3099 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3100 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3101 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3102 without losing information).
3103
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003104- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003105 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3106 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3107 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3108 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3109 module).
3110
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003111 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003112 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3113 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3114 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3115 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003116
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003117- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003118 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3119 encoding.
3120
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003121- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3122 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3123
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003125 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3126
3127- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3128 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3129 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3130 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3131
3132- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3133
3134- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3135 ON, and OFF.
3136
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003137- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3138 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3139
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003140Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003141-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003142
3143- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3144 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3145 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003146
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003147- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3148 been added: -X and -E.
3149
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003150Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003151-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003152
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003153- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3154 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3155
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003156C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003157-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003158
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003159- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3160 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3161 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3162 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3163 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3164
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003165- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3166 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3167 as long) arguments.
3168
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003169- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3170 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3171 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3172 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3173 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3174 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3175
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003176- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3177 input.
3178
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003179New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003181
3182Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003183-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003184
3185Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003186-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003187
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003188- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3189 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3190 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3191
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003192- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3193 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3194 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003195 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003196
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3198 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3199 import signal
3200 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003203 while 1:
3204 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003206 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3207 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3208 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3209 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003210
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003211
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003212What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3213===========================
3214
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3216
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003217Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003219
3220- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3221 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3222 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3223
3224- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3225 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3226 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3227 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3228 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3229 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3230 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003231
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003232- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003233 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003234 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3235 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3236 associate a docstring with a property.
3237
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003238- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3239 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3240 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3241 other built-in object types.
3242
3243- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3244 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3245 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3246 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3247 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3248
3249- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3250 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3251
3252- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3253 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003254 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003255 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3256 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3257 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3258 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3259 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3260
3261- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3262 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3263 class.
3264
3265- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3266 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3267 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3268 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3269
3270- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3271 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3272 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3273 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3274
3275- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3276 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3277
3278- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3279 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3280 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3281 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3282 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003283 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003284 with the same value as s.
3285
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003286- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3287
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003288Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003289----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003290
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003291- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3292
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003293- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3294 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3295 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3296 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3297 objects.
3298
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003299- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3300 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003301 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3302 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3303
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003304- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3305 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3306 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3307
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003308Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003310
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003311- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3312 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3313 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3314 by the instances.
3315
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003316- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3317 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3318 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3319
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003320- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3321 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3322 before the entire comparison is complete.
3323
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003324- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3325 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3326 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3327
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003328- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3329 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3330 getwriter().
3331
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003332- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3333 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3334
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003335- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003336 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3337 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3338
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003339- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3340 iterable object.
3341
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003342- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3343 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003344
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003345- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3346 authentication.
3347
3348- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3349 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003350
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003351- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003352 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3353 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3354 a sample driver.)
3355
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003356Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003358
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003359- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3360 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3361 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3362 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3363 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3364 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3365 kernel has large file support.
3366
3367- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3368 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3369 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3370 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3371 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3372
3373- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3374 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3375 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3376
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003377C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003379
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003380- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3381 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3382
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003383New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003384-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003385
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003386- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3387 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3388
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003389Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003390-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003391
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003392- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3393 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3394 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3395 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3396 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3397
3398- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3399 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3400 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3401 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3402
3403- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3404 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3405
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003406Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003408
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003409- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003410 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3411 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003412
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003413
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003414What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3415===========================
3416
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3418
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003419Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003420----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003421
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003422- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3423 big to represent as a C double.
3424
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003425- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3426 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3427 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3428 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3429 restriction).
3430
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003431- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3432 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3433 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3434 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3435 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3436
3437 >>> dir([])
3438 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3439 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3440 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3441 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3442 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3443 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3444 'reverse', 'sort']
3445
3446 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3447
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003448- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003449 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3450 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3451 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3452 OverflowError exception.
3453
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003454- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003455 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003456 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3457 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3458 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3459 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3460 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003461 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003462 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3463 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3464
3465 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3466 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3467 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3468 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003469
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003470- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003471 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3472 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3473 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3474 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3475 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3476 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3477 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3478 once it is created.
3479
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003480- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3481 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3482 (key, value) pairs.
3483
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003484- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003485 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3486 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3487
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003488- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3489 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3490 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3491 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3492 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003493
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003494- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003495 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3496 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3497
3498 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3499
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003500- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003501 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3502
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003503Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003505
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003506- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003507 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3508 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003509
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003510- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3511 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3512 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3513 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3514 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3515 in this area anymore).
3516
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003517- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3518 threading.Timer.
3519
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003520- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3521 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3522
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003523- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003524 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3525
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003526- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003527 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3528 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3529 converted to Python longs.
3530
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003531- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003532 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3533
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003534- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3535 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3536 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3537
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003538Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003540
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003541- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3542 division operators as per PEP 238.
3543
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003544Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003546
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003547- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3548 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3549 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3550 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3551
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003552C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003553-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003554
3555- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003556
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003557- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3558 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003559 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003560
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3562 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003563 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003565
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003566- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003567 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3568 module:
3569
3570 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003571
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003572 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3573 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003574
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003575 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3576 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003577
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003578 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3579
3580 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3581
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003582- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003583 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3584 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3585 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003586
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003587New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003589
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003590- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3591 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3592 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3593 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3594 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003595
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003596Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003597-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003598
3599Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003601
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003602- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3603 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3604 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3605 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003606 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3607 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3608 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3609 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3610 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003611
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003612- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003613 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3614
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003615
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003616What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3617===========================
3618
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3620
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003621Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003623
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003624- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3625 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3626
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003627- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3628 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3629 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003630
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003631- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3632 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3633 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3634 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003635
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003636- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3637
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003639
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003640Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003641-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003642
3643- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003644 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003645 the module docstring for details.
3646
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003647Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003649
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003650- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003651 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3652 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3653 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003654
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003655- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3656 Nick Mathewson.
3657
3658Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003660
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003661- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3662 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3663 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3664 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3665 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3666 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3667 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3668 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3669
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003670- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3671 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3672 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3673 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3674
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003675- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3676 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3677 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3678 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3679 come a long way).
3680
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003681- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3682 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3683 write filters for these warnings).
3684
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003685- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3686 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3687 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3688 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3689 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3690
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003691- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3692 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3693 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3694 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3695 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3696 older distribution.
3697
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003698Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003700
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003701- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3702 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003703 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003704
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003705- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3706 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3707 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3708
3709- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3710
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003711- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3712
3713- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3714
3715- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3716
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003718
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003719- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3720
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003721New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003723
3724C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003726
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003727- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3728 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3729 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3730 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3731 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3732 against buffer overruns.
3733
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003734- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003735 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3736 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003737 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3738 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3739 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3740
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003741- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3742 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3743 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3744 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3745 deprecated.
3746
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003747Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003749
3750- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3751 relevant is found.
3752
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003753
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003754What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003755===========================
3756
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3758
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003759Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003761
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003762- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3763 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3764 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3765 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3766 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3767 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3768 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3769 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003770 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003771 repaired.
3772
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003773- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003774 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003775 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3776 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3777 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3778 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3779 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3780 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3781 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3782 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3783
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003784- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3785 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3786 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3787 leading BMO character).
3788
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003789- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3790 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3791 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3792
3793 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3794 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3795 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003796
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003797 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3798 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3799 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3800 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3801 for various simple to use conversions.
3802
3803 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3804 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3805
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3807 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3808 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3809 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3810 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3811 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3812 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3813 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3814 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3815 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3816 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3817 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3818 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3819 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3820 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003821
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003822- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3823 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3824 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003825 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003826 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003827
3828 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003829 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3830 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3831 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3832 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3833 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003834 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3835 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003836
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003837 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3838 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3839 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003840 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003841
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003842- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3843 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3844 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3845 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3846 floating arithmetic,
3847
3848 x = 9007199254740992.0
3849 print long(x)
3850
3851 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3852 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3853 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3854 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3855 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3856 functions are of good quality).
3857
3858 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3859 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3860 algorithms to break.
3861
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003862- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3863 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3864 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3865 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3866 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3867 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3868 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3869 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3870 order.
3871
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003872- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3873 operation along the most common code paths.
3874
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003875- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3876 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3877
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003878- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3879 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3880 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3881 {}.update(UserDict())
3882
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003883- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3884 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3885 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3886 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3887 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3888 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3889 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3890 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3891
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003892- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003893 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003895 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003896 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3897 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003898 join() method of strings
3899 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003900 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3901 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003903 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003904
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003905- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3906 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3907
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003908- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3909 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3910
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003911- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3912 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3913 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3914 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3915
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003916- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3917 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003918 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003919 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3920 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003921
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003922- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3923
3924
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003925Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003927
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003928- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003929 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003930 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3931 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3932
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003933- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3934 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3935
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003936- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3937 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3938 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3939 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3940
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003941- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3942 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3943 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3944
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003945- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3946
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003947- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3948
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003949- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3950 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3951 that are still imported into string.py).
3952
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003953- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3954
3955- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3956 Now it does.
3957
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003958- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3959
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003960- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3961 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3962 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3963 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3964 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003965 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3966 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003967
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003968- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3969 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3970 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3971 'help(object)'.
3972
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003973Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003975
3976- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003977 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003978 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3979 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3980
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003981- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003982 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3983 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003984
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003985C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003987
3988- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3989 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990
3991----
3992
3993**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**