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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
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000015- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
16
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000017- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
18 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
19 arguments.
20
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000021Extension modules
22-----------------
23
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000024- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
25
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000026- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
27 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
28 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
29
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000030- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
31
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000032- datetime changes:
33
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +000034 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
35 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
36 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
37 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
38 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
39 now.
40
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000041 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000042 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
43 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000044
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000045 In dt.asdatetime(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000046 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000047 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
48 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
49 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
50 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000051
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000052 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
53 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
54 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000055 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
56
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000057 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
58 by a later example coded by Guido.
59
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000060 datetimetz.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
61 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
62 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
63 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
64 ends. See new docs for details.
65
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +000066 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
67 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
68 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
69 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
70 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
71
Neal Norwitzdf8b47f2003-01-10 20:57:54 +000072- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
73 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
74
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000075Library
76-------
77
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +000078- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
79 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
80
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +000081- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
82 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
83 See SF bug #659228.
84
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +000085- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
86 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
87 See SF patch #651082.
88
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +000089- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000090
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000091Tools/Demos
92-----------
93
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000094TBD
95
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000096Build
97-----
98
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +000099- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
100 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
101 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
102 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
103 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
104 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
105 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
106 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
107 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
108
109- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
110 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
111 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
112 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
113
114- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
115 from the Tools/scripts directory.
116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000117C API
118-----
119
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000120TBD
121
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000122New platforms
123-------------
124
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000125TBD
126
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000127Tests
128-----
129
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000130TBD
131
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000132Windows
133-------
134
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000135- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
136 absolute pathname.
137
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000138- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
139 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
140
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000141Mac
142---
143
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000144TBD
145
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000146
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000147What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000148=================================
149
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000150*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000151
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000152Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000153--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000154
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000155- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
156
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000157- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
158 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000159 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000160 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000161 a different meaning than before.
162
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000163- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000164 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000165 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000166
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000167- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000168 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000169 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000170
171- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
172 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
173 and deallocation.
174
175- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
176 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
177
178- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
179 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
180 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
181 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
182 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
183
184- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
185 now detected by the garbage collector.
186
187- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
188 [SF bug 519621]
189
190- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
191 identifier.
192
193- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
194 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
195 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
196 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
197 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
198 [SF bug 563060]
199
200- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
201 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
202 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
203 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
204 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
205
206- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
207 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
208 not called. [SF bug #537450]
209
210- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
211
212- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
213 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
214 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
215 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
216 state of the slots would be lost.)
217
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000218Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000219-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000220
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000221- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000222 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
223 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
224 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
225 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000226 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
227 Jython 2.1.
228
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000229- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000230 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000231 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
232 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
233 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
234 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
235 these, see PEP 302.
236
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000237- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
238 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
239 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
240
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000241- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
242 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
243 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
244
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000245- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
246 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
247 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
248
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000249- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
250 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
251 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
252 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
253 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
254 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
255 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
256 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
257 releases or implementations.
258
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000259- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000260 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
261 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000262
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000263- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
264 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
265
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000266- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
267 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
268 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
269
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000270- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
271 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
272
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000273- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
274 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000275 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
276 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000277
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000278- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
279 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
280 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
281 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
282 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
283
284 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
285 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
286 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
287 pattern.
288
289 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
290 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
291 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
292 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
293
294 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
295 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
296 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
297 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
298 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
299 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
300
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000301- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
302 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
303 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
304 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
305 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
306 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
307 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
308 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000309
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000310- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
311 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
312 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
313 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
314 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000315 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
316 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
317 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
318 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
319 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
320 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
321 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000322
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000323- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
324 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
325
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000326- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
327 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
328 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
329 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
330 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
331 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
332 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
333 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
334 to Zack Weinberg!
335
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000336- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
337 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
338 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
339 type. This has been fixed now.
340
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000341- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
342 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
343 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
344
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000345- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
346 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
347 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
348 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
349 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
350 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
351 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
352 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000353 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000354
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000355- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
356 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
357 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000358
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000359- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
360 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
361 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
362 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
363 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
364 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
365 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
366 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000367 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000368 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
369 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
370
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000371- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
372 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
373 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
374 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
375 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
376 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
377 this.)
378
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000379- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
380 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000381 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000382 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000383 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
384 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000385 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
386 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000387
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000388- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
389 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
390 currently running.
391
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000392- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
393 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
394 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
395 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
396
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000397- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
398 as directory names.
399
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000400- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
401 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
402
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000403- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
404 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
405
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000406- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000407 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
408 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000409
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000410- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
411 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
412 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
413 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
414 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
415
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000416- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
417 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
418 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
419 removed.
420
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000421- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
422 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
423 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
424
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000425- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
426 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
427 to __debug__.
428
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000429- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
430 string to the left with zeros. For example,
431 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
432
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000433- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
434 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
435 deprecated now.
436
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000437- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
438 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
439 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000440
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000441- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
442 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
443 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
444 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
445 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000446
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000447- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
448 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
449
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000450- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
451 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
452 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000453 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000454 is backward compatible.
455
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000456- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
457 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
458 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
459 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
460 could access a pointer to freed memory.
461
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000462- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
463 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
464 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
465 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
466 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
467 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000468
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000469- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
470 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
471
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000472- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
473 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
474
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000475- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
476 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
477 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
478 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
479 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
480
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000481- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
482 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
483 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
484
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000485- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000486 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
487
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000488- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
489 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
490 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000491
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000492- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
493 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
494
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000495- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
496 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
497 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
498
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000499Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000500-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000501
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000502- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
503
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000504- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
505 archives.
506
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000507- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
508 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
509 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
510
511 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
512
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000513- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
514 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
515 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000516 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000517
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000518- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
519 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
520 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
521 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
522 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000523
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000524- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
525 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000526
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000527- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
528
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000529- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
530 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
531
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000532- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
533 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
534 supported.
535
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000536- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
537
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000538- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
539 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000540
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000541- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
542 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
543
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000544- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
545
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000546- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
547 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
548
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000549- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
550 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
551 functions but callable type objects.
552
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000553- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000554 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000555 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000556
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000557- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
558 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000559
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000560- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
561 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000562
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000563- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
564 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
565 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
566 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
567
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000568- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
569 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000570
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000571- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
572 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
573 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
574 and __imul__.
575
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000576- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000577 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
578 is called.
579
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000580- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
581 been added where available.
582
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000583- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
584 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
585 interpreter was compiled.
586
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000587- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
588 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
589 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000590 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000591 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
592 1, not 2.
593
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000594- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
595 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
596 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
597 limit.
598
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000599- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
600 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
601 bug #623464.
602
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000603- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
604 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
605 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
606 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
607
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000608Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000609-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000610
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000611- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
612
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000613- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
614 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
615 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
616 with Python 2.3a2.
617
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000618- os.path exposes getctime.
619
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000620- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
621 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
622 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
623 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
624 unit tests of floating point results.
625
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000626- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
627 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
628 has been increased.
629
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000630- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
631 executed.
632
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000633- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
634 postinstallation script.
635
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000636- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
637 test the current module.
638
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000639- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
640 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
641 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
642 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
643 this behavior needs to be controlled.
644
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000645- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000646 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000647 Ward's Optik package.
648
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000649- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
650 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
651 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
652 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
653
654- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
655 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000656 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000657
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000658- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
659 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
660 shelf are binary pickles.
661
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000662- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
663 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
664
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000665- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
666 modules are iterators now.
667
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000668- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
669 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
670 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
671 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
672 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
673 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000674
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000675- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
676 with their entity value.
677
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000678- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
679
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000680- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
681 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000682
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000683- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
684 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000685 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000686
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000687- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
688 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
689 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
690 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
691 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
692 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
693 main():
694
695 import locale
696 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
697
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000698- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
699 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
700
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000701- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
702 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
703 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
704 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
705 to the new standard.
706
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000707- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
708 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
709 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
710 an extension to the database.
711
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000712- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
713 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
714 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
715 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000716 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000717
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000718- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
719
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000720- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000721 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000722
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000723- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
724 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
725 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
726 bounded integers.
727
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000728- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
729 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
730 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
731 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
732 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
733 in existence.
734
735 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
736 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
737 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
738 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
739 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
740 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
741
742 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
743 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
744 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
745 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
746
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000747- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
748 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
749 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
750
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000751- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
752
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000753- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
754 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
755 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
756 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
757
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000758- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
759 argument.
760
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000761- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
762 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
763 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
764 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
765 [SF patch 560794].
766
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000767- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
768 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
769 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000770 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
771 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
772 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000773
774- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
775 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000776
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000777- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
778 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
779 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
780 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000781
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000782- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
783 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
784 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
785 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
786 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
787
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000788- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000789
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000790- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
791
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000792- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
793 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
794 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
795 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
796 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
797 identical to None.
798
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000799- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
800 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
801 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
802 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
803 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
804 results now.
805
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000806- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
807 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
808
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000809- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
810 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
811 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
812 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
813 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
814 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
815 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
816 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
817
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000818- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
819
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000820- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
821 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
822
823- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
824 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
825 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
826 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
827 and other systems.
828
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000829- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
830 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
831 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
832 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 +0000833 work well with these.
834
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000835- compileall now supports quiet operation.
836
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000837- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000838 connections.
839
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000840- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
841 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
842 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
843
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000844- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
845 sets
846
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000847- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
848 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
849 name.
850
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000851- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
852 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
853 passed in.
854
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000855- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000856 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000857 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
858 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000859
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000860- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
861
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000862- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
863
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000864- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
865 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
866 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
867
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000868- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
869 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
870 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
871 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000872 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000873
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000874- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000875 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000876 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000877
878- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
879 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
880 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
881
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000882- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000883 the value of its expression argument.
884
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000885- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
886 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
887 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
888
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000889- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
890 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
891 skipstone browser was included.
892
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000893- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
894 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
895
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000896Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000897-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000898
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000899- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
900 names in addition to accepting file names.
901
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000902- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
903 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
904 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
905 still used and useful.)
906
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000907- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
908 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
909 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
910 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000911
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000912- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
913 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
914 the generated binary.
915
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000916Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000917-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000918
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000919- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
920
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000921- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
922 except in the hands of experts.
923
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000924- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000925 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
926 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
927 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000928
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000929- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
930 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
931 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
932 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
933 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
934 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
935 builds.
936
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000937- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
938 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
939 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
940 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
941 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
942 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
943 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
944 new type.
945
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000946- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000947
948 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
949 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
950 positive infinities.
951
952 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
953 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
954 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
955 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
956 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
957 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
958 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
959
960 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
961
962 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
963
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000964- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
965 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
966 size of the executable.
967
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000968- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
969 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
970 configure script. On other platforms, remove
971 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000972
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000973- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
974
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000975- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
976 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
977 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000978
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000979- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
980 well as Unix.
981
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000982- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
983 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
984 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
985 modules in the README file for details.
986
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000987C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000988-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000989
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000990- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
991 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000992 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000993 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000994 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000995
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000996- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
997 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
998 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
999 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1000 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1001 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1002 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1003 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1004 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1005 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1006 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1007 aligned.)
1008
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001009- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1010 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1011 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1012
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001013- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1014 level.
1015
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001016- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1017 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1018 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1019 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1020 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1021
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001022- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1023 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1024 code.
1025
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001026- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1027 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1028 adjusting for negative indices.
1029
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001030- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1031 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1032 object.
1033
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001034- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1035 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1036 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1037
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001038- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1039 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001040
1041- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1042
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001043- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1044 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1045 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1046 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1047
1048- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1049
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001050- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001051
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001052- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001053 without going through the buffer API.
1054
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001055- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001056
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001057- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1058 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1059 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1060 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1061
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001062- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1063 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1064
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001065- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001066 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1067
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001068New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001069-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001070
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001071- OpenVMS is now supported.
1072
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001073- AtheOS is now supported.
1074
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001075- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1076
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001077- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1078
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001079Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001080-----
1081
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001082- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1083 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1084 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001085
1086Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001087-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001088
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001089- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1090 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1091 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1092 bugs.
1093 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001094 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1095 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1096 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001097 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001098
1099- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001100 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001101
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001102- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1103 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1104
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001105- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1106 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1107 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1108 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1109
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001110- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1111 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1112 use files" uninstall option).
1113
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001114- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1115
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001116- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1117 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1118
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001119- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1120 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1121 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1122
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001123- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1124 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1125 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1126 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1127 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001128 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1129 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1130 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001131
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001132- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001133 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001134 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1135 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1136 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1137 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1138 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1139 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1140 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1141 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1142 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1143 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1144 work around.
1145
1146- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1147 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1148 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1149 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1150 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1151 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1152 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1153 specified with O_CREAT too).
1154
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001155Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001156----
1157
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001158- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001159
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001160- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1161 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1162 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1163
1164- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1165 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1166 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1167 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1168 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1169 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1170 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1171 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001172
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001173- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1174 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1175 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001176
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001177- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1178 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1179 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1180 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1181 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001182
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001183- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1184 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1185 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001186
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001187- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1188 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001189
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001190- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1191 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1192 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1193 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1194 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001195
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001196- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1197 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1198 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1199
1200- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1201 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1202 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001203
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001204- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1205 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1206 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1207 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1208 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001209
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001210- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1211 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001212
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001213- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1214 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001215
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001216- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1217 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1218 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1219 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001220
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001221What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001222===============================
1223
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001224*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1225
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001226Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001227--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001228
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001229- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1230 with a custom metaclass.
1231
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001232Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001233-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001234
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001235- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1236 are proxies.
1237
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001238Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001239-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001240
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001241- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1242 very short strings.
1243
1244- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1245 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1246 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1247 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1248 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1249
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001250Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001251-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001252
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001253- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1254 close or delete time).
1255
1256- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1257 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1258
1259- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1260
1261- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001262 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001263
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001264Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001265-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001266
1267Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001268-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001269
1270C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001271-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001272
1273New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001274-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001275
1276Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001277-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001278
1279Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001280-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001281
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001282- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1283
1284- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1285 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1286
1287- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1288 deleted at process exit time.
1289
1290- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1291 in backslash.
1292
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001293Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001294----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001295
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001296- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1297 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1298 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1299
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001300
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001301What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001302===========================
1303
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001304*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1305
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001306Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001307--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001308
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001309- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1310 been extensively updated. See
1311
1312 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1313
1314 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1315
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001316- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1317 deleted!
1318
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001319- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1320 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1321 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1322 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1323 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1324
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001325- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1326
1327 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1328 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1329
1330 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1331 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1332 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1333 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1334 supported anyway.
1335
1336 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1337 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1338
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001339- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1340 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1341 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1342 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1343 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001344
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001345- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1346 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1347 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1348
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001349Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001350-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001351
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001352- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1353 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1354 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1355 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1356 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1357 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001358 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1359 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1360 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1361 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001362
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001363- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1364 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1365 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1366
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001367Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001368-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001369
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001370- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1371
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001372Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001373-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001374
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001375- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1376 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1377 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1378 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1379 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1380 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1381
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001382- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1383
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001384- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1385
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001386- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1387
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001388- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1389 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1390 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1391
1392- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1393
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001394Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001395-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001396
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001397- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1398 off a search on Google.
1399
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001400Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001401-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001402
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001403- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1404 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1405 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1406 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1407 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1408 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1409 other platforms should do likewise.
1410
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001411- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1412 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1413 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1414
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001415C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001416-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001417
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001418- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1419 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1420 producing key-value pairs.
1421
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001422- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001423 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001424 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1425 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1426 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1427 previously went unchallenged.
1428
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001429New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001430-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001431
1432Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001433-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001434
1435Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001436-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001437
1438Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001439----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001440
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001441- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1442 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001443
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001444- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1445 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1446 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1447 home.
1448
1449
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001450What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001451===========================
1452
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001453*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1454
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001455Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001456--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001457
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001458- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1459 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001460
1461 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001462 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001463
1464 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1465 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001466 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001467 This needs to be documented.
1468
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001469- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1470 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1471
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001472- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1473 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1474 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1475
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001476- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1477 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1478
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001479- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1480 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1481 class forbids it).
1482
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001483- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1484 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1485 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1486
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001487- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1488
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001489Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001490-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001491
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001492- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1493 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001494 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001495
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001496- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1497 (like 1 + '').
1498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001499Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001500-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001501
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001502- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1503 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1504 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1505 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001506 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001507 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1508
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001509- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1510 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1511 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1512 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1513
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001514- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1515 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001516 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1517 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1518 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001519
1520- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1521 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001522
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001523- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1524 bytes on its input.
1525
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001526Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001527-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001528
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001529- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001530 convenience function.
1531
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001532- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1533 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1534 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001535 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1536 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1537 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1538 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1539 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1540 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001541
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001542- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1543 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1544 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1545 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1546
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001547- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1548 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1549 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1550
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001551- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1552 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1553 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1554 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1555
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001556- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1557 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001558 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001559 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1560 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1561 new -l and -e options.
1562
1563- statcache is now deprecated.
1564
1565- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1566 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001567 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001568 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1569 time properly taken into account.
1570
1571- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1572 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1573 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1574 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1575
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001576Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001577-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001578
1579Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001580-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001581
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001582- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1583 is built with libdb3 if available.
1584
1585- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1586
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001587C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001588-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001589
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001590- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1591 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1592 PySequence_Size().
1593
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001594- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1595
1596- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1597 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1598 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1599
1600- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1601 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1602
1603- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1604 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1605
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001606New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001607-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001608
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001609- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1610 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1611
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001612- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1613 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1614
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001615- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1616
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001617Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001618-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001619
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001620- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1621 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1622
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001623Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001624-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001625
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001626Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001627----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001628
1629- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1630 removed completely in the next release.
1631
1632- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1633 OSX.
1634
1635- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1636 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1637
1638- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1639
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001640
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001641What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001642===========================
1643
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001644*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1645
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001646Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001647--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001648
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001649- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001650 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001651 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001652 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1653 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001654 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1655 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001656 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1657 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001658
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001659- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1660 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1661
1662- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1663 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1664
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001665Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001666-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001667
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001668- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1669 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1670 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1671 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1672 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1673 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1674 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1675 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1676
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001677- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1678 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1679 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1680 example).
1681
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001682- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001683 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001684 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001685 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001686
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001687- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1688 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1689 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001690 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001691
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001692- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1693 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1694 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1695 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1696 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1697 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1698
1699 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1700
1701 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1702
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001703Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001704-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001705
1706- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1707
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001708- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1709
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001710- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1711 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001712
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001713- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1714 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1715 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1716 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1717 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1718 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001719 attributes.
1720
1721- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1722 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1723 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001724
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001725- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1726 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1727 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001728
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001729- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1730 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1731 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001732 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1733 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1734
1735- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1736 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001737
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001738Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001739-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001740
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001741- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1742 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1743
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001744- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1745 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1746 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1747 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1748
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001749- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1750 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1751 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1752 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1753
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001754 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1755 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1756 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1757 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1758 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1759 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1760 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1761 without losing information).
1762
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001763- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001764 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1765 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1766 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1767 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1768 module).
1769
1770 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1771 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1772 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1773 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1774 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001775
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001776- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001777 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1778 encoding.
1779
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001780- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1781 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1782
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001783- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001784 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1785
1786- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1787 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1788 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1789 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1790
1791- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1792
1793- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1794 ON, and OFF.
1795
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001796- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1797 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1798
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001799Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001800-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001801
1802- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1803 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1804 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001805
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001806- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1807 been added: -X and -E.
1808
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001809Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001810-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001811
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001812- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1813 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1814
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001815C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001816-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001817
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001818- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1819 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1820 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1821 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1822 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1823
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001824- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1825 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1826 as long) arguments.
1827
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001828- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1829 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1830 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1831 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1832 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1833 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1834
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001835- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1836 input.
1837
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001838New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001839-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001840
1841Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001842-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001843
1844Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001845-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001846
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001847- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1848 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1849 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1850
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001851- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1852 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1853 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001854 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001855
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001856 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1857 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1858 import signal
1859 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001860
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001861 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001862 while 1:
1863 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001864 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001865 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1866 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1867 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1868 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001869
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001870
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001871What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1872===========================
1873
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001874*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1875
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001876Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001877--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001878
1879- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1880 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1881 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1882
1883- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1884 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1885 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1886 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1887 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1888 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1889 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001890
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001891- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001892 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001893 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1894 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1895 associate a docstring with a property.
1896
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001897- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1898 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1899 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1900 other built-in object types.
1901
1902- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1903 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1904 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1905 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1906 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1907
1908- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1909 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1910
1911- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1912 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001913 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001914 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1915 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1916 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1917 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1918 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1919
1920- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1921 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1922 class.
1923
1924- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1925 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1926 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1927 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1928
1929- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1930 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1931 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1932 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1933
1934- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1935 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1936
1937- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1938 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1939 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1940 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1941 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001942 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001943 with the same value as s.
1944
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001945- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1946
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001947Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001948----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001949
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001950- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1951
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001952- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1953 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1954 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1955 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1956 objects.
1957
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001958- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1959 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001960 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1961 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1962
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001963- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1964 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1965 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1966
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001967Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001968-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001969
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001970- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1971 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1972 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1973 by the instances.
1974
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001975- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1976 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1977 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1978
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001979- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1980 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1981 before the entire comparison is complete.
1982
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001983- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1984 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1985 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1986
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001987- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1988 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1989 getwriter().
1990
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001991- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1992 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1993
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001994- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001995 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1996 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1997
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001998- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1999 iterable object.
2000
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002001- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2002 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002003
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002004- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2005 authentication.
2006
2007- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2008 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002009
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002010- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002011 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2012 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2013 a sample driver.)
2014
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002015Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002016-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002017
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002018- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2019 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2020 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2021 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2022 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2023 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2024 kernel has large file support.
2025
2026- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2027 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2028 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2029 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2030 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2031
2032- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2033 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2034 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2035
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002036C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002037-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002038
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002039- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2040 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2041
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002042New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002043-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002044
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002045- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2046 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2047
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002048Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002049-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002050
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002051- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2052 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2053 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2054 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2055 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2056
2057- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2058 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2059 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2060 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2061
2062- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2063 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2064
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002065Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002066-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002067
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002068- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002069 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2070 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002071
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002072
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002073What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2074===========================
2075
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2077
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002078Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002079----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002080
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002081- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2082 big to represent as a C double.
2083
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002084- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2085 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2086 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2087 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2088 restriction).
2089
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002090- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2091 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2092 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2093 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2094 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2095
2096 >>> dir([])
2097 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2098 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2099 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2100 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2101 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2102 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2103 'reverse', 'sort']
2104
2105 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2106
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002107- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002108 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2109 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2110 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2111 OverflowError exception.
2112
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002113- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002114 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002115 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2116 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2117 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2118 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2119 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002120 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002121 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2122 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2123
2124 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2125 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2126 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2127 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002128
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002129- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002130 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2131 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2132 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2133 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2134 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2135 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2136 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2137 once it is created.
2138
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002139- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2140 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2141 (key, value) pairs.
2142
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002143- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002144 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2145 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2146
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002147- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2148 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2149 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2150 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2151 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002152
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002153- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002154 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2155 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2156
2157 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2158
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002159- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002160 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2161
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002162Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002163-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002164
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002165- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002166 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2167 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002168
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002169- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2170 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2171 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2172 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2173 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2174 in this area anymore).
2175
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002176- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2177 threading.Timer.
2178
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002179- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2180 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2181
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002182- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002183 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2184
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002185- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002186 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2187 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2188 converted to Python longs.
2189
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002190- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002191 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2192
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002193- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2194 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2195 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2196
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002197Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002198-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002199
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002200- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2201 division operators as per PEP 238.
2202
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002203Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002204-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002205
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002206- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2207 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2208 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2209 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2210
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002211C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002212-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002213
2214- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002215
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002216- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2217 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002218 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002219
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002220 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2221 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002222 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002223 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002224
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002225- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002226 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2227 module:
2228
2229 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002230
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002231 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2232 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002233
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002234 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2235 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002236
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002237 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2238
2239 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2240
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002241- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002242 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2243 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2244 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002245
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002246New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002247-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002248
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002249- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2250 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2251 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2252 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2253 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002254
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002255Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002256-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002257
2258Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002259-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002260
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002261- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2262 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2263 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2264 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002265 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2266 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2267 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2268 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2269 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002270
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002271- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002272 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2273
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002274
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002275What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2276===========================
2277
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002278*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2279
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002280Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002281-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002282
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002283- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2284 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2285
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002286- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2287 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2288 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002289
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002290- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2291 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2292 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2293 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002294
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002295- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2296
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002297- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002298
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002299Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002300-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002301
2302- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002303 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002304 the module docstring for details.
2305
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002306Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002307-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002308
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002309- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002310 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2311 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2312 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002313
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002314- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2315 Nick Mathewson.
2316
2317Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002318----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002319
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002320- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2321 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2322 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2323 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2324 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2325 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2326 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2327 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2328
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002329- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2330 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2331 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2332 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2333
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002334- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2335 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2336 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2337 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2338 come a long way).
2339
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002340- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2341 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2342 write filters for these warnings).
2343
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002344- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2345 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2346 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2347 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2348 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2349
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002350- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2351 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2352 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2353 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2354 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2355 older distribution.
2356
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002357Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002358-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002359
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002360- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2361 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002362 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002363
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002364- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2365 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2366 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2367
2368- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2369
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002370- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2371
2372- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2373
2374- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2375
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002377
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002378- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2379
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002380New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002381-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002382
2383C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002384-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002385
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002386- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2387 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2388 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2389 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2390 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2391 against buffer overruns.
2392
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002393- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002394 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2395 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002396 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2397 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2398 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2399
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002400- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2401 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2402 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2403 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2404 deprecated.
2405
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002406Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002407-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002408
2409- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2410 relevant is found.
2411
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002412
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002413What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002414===========================
2415
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002416*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2417
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002418Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002419----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002420
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002421- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2422 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2423 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2424 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2425 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2426 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2427 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2428 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002429 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002430 repaired.
2431
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002432- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002433 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002434 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2435 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2436 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2437 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2438 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2439 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2440 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2441 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2442
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002443- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2444 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2445 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2446 leading BMO character).
2447
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002448- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2449 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2450 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2451
2452 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2453 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2454 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002455
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002456 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2457 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2458 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2459 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2460 for various simple to use conversions.
2461
2462 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2463 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2464
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002465 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2466 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2467 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2468 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2469 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2470 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2471 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2472 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2473 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2474 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2475 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2476 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2477 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2478 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2479 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002480
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002481- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2482 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2483 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002484 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002485 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002486
2487 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002488 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2489 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2490 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2491 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2492 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002493 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2494 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002495
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002496 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2497 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2498 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002499 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002500
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002501- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2502 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2503 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2504 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2505 floating arithmetic,
2506
2507 x = 9007199254740992.0
2508 print long(x)
2509
2510 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2511 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2512 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2513 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2514 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2515 functions are of good quality).
2516
2517 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2518 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2519 algorithms to break.
2520
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002521- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2522 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2523 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2524 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2525 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2526 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2527 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2528 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2529 order.
2530
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002531- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2532 operation along the most common code paths.
2533
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002534- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2535 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2536
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002537- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2538 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2539 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2540 {}.update(UserDict())
2541
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002542- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2543 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2544 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2545 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2546 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2547 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2548 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2549 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2550
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002551- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002552 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002553
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002554 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002555 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2556 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002557 join() method of strings
2558 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002559 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2560 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002561 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002562 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002563
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002564- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2565 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2566
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002567- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2568 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2569
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002570- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2571 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2572 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2573 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2574
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002575- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2576 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002577 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002578 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2579 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002580
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002581- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2582
2583
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002584Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002586
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002587- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002588 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002589 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2590 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2591
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002592- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2593 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2594
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002595- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2596 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2597 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2598 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2599
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002600- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2601 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2602 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2603
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002604- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2605
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002606- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2607
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002608- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2609 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2610 that are still imported into string.py).
2611
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002612- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2613
2614- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2615 Now it does.
2616
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002617- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2618
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002619- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2620 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2621 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2622 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2623 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002624 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2625 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002626
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002627- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2628 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2629 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2630 'help(object)'.
2631
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002632Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002633-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002634
2635- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002636 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002637 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2638 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2639
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002640- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002641 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2642 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002643
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002644C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002645-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002646
2647- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2648 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002649
2650----
2651
2652**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**