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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
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +000015- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
16 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
17
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +000018- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
19 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
20 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
21 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
22 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
23 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
24 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
25 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
26 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
27 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
28 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
29 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
30 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +000031
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +000032- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
33 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
34 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
35 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
36 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
37
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +000038- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
39 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
40
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +000041- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
42 It's writable again.
43
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +000044- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
45 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
46 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
47 preferred, then __iter__ can be overriden.
48
Neil Schemenauer4e3363e2003-06-09 18:42:19 +000049- Creating an attribute on a module (i.e. a global variable created by
50 __setattr__) that causes a builtin name to be shadowed now raises a
51 DeprecationWarning. In future versions of Python the effect may be
52 undefined (in order to allow for optimization of global and builtin
53 name lookups).
54
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000055Extension modules
56-----------------
57
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +000058- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
59 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
60 unique within a single program run.
61
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +000062- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
63 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
64
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +000065- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
66 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
67
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +000068- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
69 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +000070
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +000071- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
72
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000073- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
74 Fixes SF bug #730685.
75
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +000076- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
77 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
78 for many BSD-derived systems.
79
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000080Library
81-------
82
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +000083- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
84 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
85 no more.
86
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +000087- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
88 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
89 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +000090 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +000091
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +000092- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
93
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +000094- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
95 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
96 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
97 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
98
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +000099- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
100 handling.
101
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000102- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
103 __doc__ of data descriptors.
104
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000105- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
106 in socket.py.
107
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000108- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
109
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000110- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
111 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
112 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
113 opener with proxy support.
114
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000115Tools/Demos
116-----------
117
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000118- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
119
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000120- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
121
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000122- diff.py is a new script for print file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff
123 formats. Provides an alternate command line interface to difflib.py.
124
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000125- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
126 files.
127
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000128Build
129-----
130
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000131- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
132 different root directory.
133
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000134C API
135-----
136
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000137- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
138 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
139 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
140 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
141 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
142 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
143 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
144 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
145 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
146 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
147
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000148New platforms
149-------------
150
151None this time.
152
153Tests
154-----
155
156- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
157 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
158
159Windows
160-------
161
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000162- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
163 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
164 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
165 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
166 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
167 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
168 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
169 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
170 that's what it's for.
171
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000172Mac
173---
174
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000175- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
176 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
177 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
178 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000179- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
180 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
181- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000182
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000183What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
184================================
185
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000186*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000187
188Core and builtins
189-----------------
190
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000191- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
192 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
193
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000194- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
195 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
196 and cannot be strings).
197
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000198- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
199 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
200 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
201 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
202
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000203- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
204 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
205 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
206 Python itself.
207
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000208- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
209 the referenced object, if it has one.
210
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000211- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
212 the thread started at
213 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
214
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000215- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
216 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
217 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
218 placed on a list index.
219
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000220- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
221 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
222 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
223 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
224
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000225- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
226 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
227 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
228 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
229 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
230 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
231 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
232
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000233- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
234 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
235 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
236 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
237 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
238
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000239- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
240 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000241
242- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
243 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
244 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
245 #693195.)
246
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000247- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
248 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000249
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000250- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000251 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000252 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
253 interpreter executions, would fail.
254
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000255- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000256 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000257 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000258
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000259Extension modules
260-----------------
261
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000262- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
263 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
264 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
265 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
266
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000267- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
268 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
269
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000270- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
271 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
272 and Greg Chapman.)
273
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000274- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
275 recursively.
276
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000277- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000278 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
279 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
280 leaks.
281
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000282- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
283
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000284- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
285 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
286 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
287 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
288 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
289 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
290 #705836.
291
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000292- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
293 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
294
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000295- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
296 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
297 See SF bug #692416.
298
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000299- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
300 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
301
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000302- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
303 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
304 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000305
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000306- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000307 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
308 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
309
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000310- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
311 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
312 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
313 timeouts to work properly.
314
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000315Library
316-------
317
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000318- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
319 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
320 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
321 future release.
322
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000323- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
324 for querying platform dependent features.
325
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000326- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000327
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000328- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
329 pickle protocol versions.
330
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000331- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
332 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
333 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
334
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000335- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
336
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000337- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
338 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
339 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
340 modules.
341
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000342- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
343 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
344 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
345
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000346- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
347 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
348
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000349- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
350 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
351 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
352
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000353- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000354 MS Office extensions.
355
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000356- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
357 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
358
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000359- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
360 execution speed of expressions and statements.
361
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000362- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
363 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
364 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
365 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
366 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
367 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
368
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000369- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
370 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
371 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000372
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000373- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
374 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
375 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
376
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000377- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
378
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000379- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
380 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
381 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
382
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000383Tools/Demos
384-----------
385
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000386- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
387 See the module docstring for details.
388
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000389Build
390-----
391
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000392- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
393 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000394
395C API
396-----
397
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000398- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
399
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000400- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
401 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
402 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
403
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000404- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
405 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000406
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000407 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
408 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
409 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000410
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000411- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000412 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
413
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000414- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
415 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
416 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000417
418New platforms
419-------------
420
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000421None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000422
423Tests
424-----
425
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000426- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
427 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000428
429Windows
430-------
431
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000432- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
433 function.
434
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000435- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
436 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000437
438Mac
439---
440
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000441- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
442 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000443
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000444- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
445 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000446
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000447- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
448 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
449 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000450
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000451- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000452 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
453 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000454
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000455- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
456 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000457
458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000459What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
460=================================
461
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000462*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000463
464Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000465-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000466
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000467- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
468 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
469 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
470
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000471- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
472 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
473 (SF patch #664376.)
474
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000475- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
476 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
477 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
478 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
479 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
480 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000481 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000482
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000483- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
484 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
485 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
486 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000487 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000488
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000489- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
490 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
491 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
492 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
493 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
494 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
495 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
496 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
497 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
498 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
499 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
500
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000501- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
502 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
503 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
504 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
505 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
506 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
507
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000508- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
509 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
510
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000511- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
512 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
513 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
514 case.)
515
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000516- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
517 passed as unicode strings.
518
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000519- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
520 See SF bug #683467.
521
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000522- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
523 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
524
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000525- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
526
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000527- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
528
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000529- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
530 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
531 arguments.
532
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000533- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
534 See SF bug #667147.
535
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000536- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000537 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000538 See SF bug #676155.
539
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000540- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000541 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000542 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
543 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
544 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
545 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
546 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
547 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000548
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000549Extension modules
550-----------------
551
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000552- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
553 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
554 tp_as_number pointer.
555
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000556- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
557 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
558 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
559 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
560 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
561
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000562- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
563
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000564- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
565
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000566- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000567 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000568 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
569 patch #678531.)
570
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000571- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
572 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
573
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000574- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
575 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
576
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000577- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
578
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000579- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
580 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
581 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
582
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000583- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
584
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000585- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
586 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
587
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000588- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000589
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000590- datetime changes:
591
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000592 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
593
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000594 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
595 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
596 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
597 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
598 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
599 now.
600
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000601 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000602 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
603 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000604
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000605 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000606 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000607 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
608 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
609 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
610 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000611
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000612 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
613 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
614 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000615 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
616
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000617 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
618 by a later example coded by Guido.
619
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000620 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000621 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
622 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
623 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000624 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
625 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
626
627 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
628 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
629 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
630 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
631 tzinfo subclass instance.
632
633 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
634 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
635 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
636 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
637 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
638 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
639 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
640 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000641
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000642 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
643 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
644 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
645 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
646 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000647 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
648
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000649 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000650
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000651 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
652 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
653 as a naive datetime object.
654
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000655 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
656 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
657 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
658
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000659 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
660 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
661 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
662 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
663 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
664 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
665 comparison.
666
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000667 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
668 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
669 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
670 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000671 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000672
673 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000674
675 and ::
676
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000677 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
678
679 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
680 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
681 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
682 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
683
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000684 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
685 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
686 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
687 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
688 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
689
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000690 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
691 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000692 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
693 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000694
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000695Library
696-------
697
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000698- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
699 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
700
701- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
702 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
703 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
704 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
705 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
706 See PEP 307 for details.
707
708- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
709 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
710
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000711- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
712 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000713 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000714 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
715 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000716 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000717
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000718- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
719 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
720
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000721- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
722 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
723 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
724
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000725- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
726
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000727- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
728 exception.
729
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000730- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
731 class.
732
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000733- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
734 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
735 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
736
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000737- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
738 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
739
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000740- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000741 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
742 See SF bug #659228.
743
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000744- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
745 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
746 See SF patch #651082.
747
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000748- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000749
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000750- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
751 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
752
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000753- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000754 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000755
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000756- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
757 DOS paths from other platforms.
758
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000759Tools/Demos
760-----------
761
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000762- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
763 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
764 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
765 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
766 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
767 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
768 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
769 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
770 example:
771
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000772 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
773 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000774
775 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
776
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000777
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000778Build
779-----
780
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000781- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
782 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
783 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000784 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
785
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000786 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
787
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000788- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
789 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
790 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
791 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
792 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
793 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
794 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
795 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
796 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
797
798- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
799 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
800 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
801 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
802
803- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
804 from the Tools/scripts directory.
805
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000806C API
807-----
808
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000809- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
810 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000811
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000812- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
813 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
814 tp_as_number pointer.
815
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000816- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
817 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
818 (SF #681367)
819
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000820- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
821 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
822 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
823 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000824
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000825Tests
826-----
827
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000828- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000829 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
830 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
831 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
832 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
833 pydoc.)
834
835- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
836
837- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000838
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000839Windows
840-------
841
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000842- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
843 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
844 time).
845
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000846- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
847 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
848
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000849- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
850 release without strong cryptography.
851
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000852- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000853 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000854
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000855- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
856 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
857
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000858Mac
859---
860
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000861- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
862 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000863
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000864- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
865 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
866 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000867
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000868- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
869 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000870
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000871- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
872 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
873 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
874 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000875
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000876- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000877 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
878 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
879 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000880
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000881
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000882What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000883=================================
884
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000885*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000886
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000887Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000888--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000889
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000890- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
891
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000892- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
893 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000894 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000895 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000896 a different meaning than before.
897
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000898- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000899 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000900 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000901
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000902- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000903 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000904 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000905
906- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
907 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
908 and deallocation.
909
910- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
911 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
912
913- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
914 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
915 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
916 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
917 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
918
919- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
920 now detected by the garbage collector.
921
922- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
923 [SF bug 519621]
924
925- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
926 identifier.
927
928- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
929 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
930 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
931 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
932 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
933 [SF bug 563060]
934
935- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
936 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
937 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
938 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
939 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
940
941- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
942 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
943 not called. [SF bug #537450]
944
945- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
946
947- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
948 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
949 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
950 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
951 state of the slots would be lost.)
952
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000953Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000954-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000955
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000956- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000957 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
958 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
959 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
960 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000961 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
962 Jython 2.1.
963
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000964- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000965 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000966 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
967 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
968 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
969 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
970 these, see PEP 302.
971
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000972- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
973 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
974 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
975
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000976- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
977 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
978 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
979
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000980- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
981 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
982 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
983
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000984- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
985 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
986 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
987 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
988 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
989 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
990 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
991 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
992 releases or implementations.
993
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000994- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000995 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
996 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000997
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000998- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
999 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1000
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001001- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1002 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1003 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1004
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001005- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1006 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1007
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001008- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1009 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001010 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1011 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001012
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001013- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1014 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1015 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1016 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1017 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1018
1019 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1020 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1021 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1022 pattern.
1023
1024 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1025 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1026 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1027 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1028
1029 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1030 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1031 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1032 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1033 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1034 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1035
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001036- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1037 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1038 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1039 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1040 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1041 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1042 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1043 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001044
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001045- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1046 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1047 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1048 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1049 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001050 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1051 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1052 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1053 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1054 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1055 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1056 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001057
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001058- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1059 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1060
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001061- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1062 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1063 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1064 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1065 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1066 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1067 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1068 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1069 to Zack Weinberg!
1070
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001071- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1072 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1073 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1074 type. This has been fixed now.
1075
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001076- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1077 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1078 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1079
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001080- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1081 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1082 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1083 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1084 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1085 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1086 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1087 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001088 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001089
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001090- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1091 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1092 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001093
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001094- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1095 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1096 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1097 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1098 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1099 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1100 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1101 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001102 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001103 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1104 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1105
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001106- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1107 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1108 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1109 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1110 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1111 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1112 this.)
1113
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001114- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1115 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001116 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001117 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001118 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1119 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001120 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1121 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001122
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001123- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1124 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1125 currently running.
1126
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001127- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1128 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1129 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1130 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1131
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001132- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1133 as directory names.
1134
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001135- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1136 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1137
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001138- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1139 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1140
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001141- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001142 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1143 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001144
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001145- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1146 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1147 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1148 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1149 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1150
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001151- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1152 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1153 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1154 removed.
1155
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001156- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1157 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1158 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1159
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001160- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1161 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1162 to __debug__.
1163
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001164- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1165 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1166 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1167
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001168- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1169 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1170 deprecated now.
1171
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001172- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1173 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1174 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001175
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001176- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1177 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1178 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1179 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1180 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001181
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001182- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1183 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1184
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001185- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1186 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1187 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001188 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001189 is backward compatible.
1190
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001191- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1192 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1193 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1194 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1195 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1196
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001197- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1198 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1199 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1200 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1201 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1202 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001203
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001204- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1205 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1206
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001207- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1208 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1209
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001210- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1211 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1212 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1213 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1214 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1215
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001216- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1217 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1218 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1219
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001220- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001221 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1222
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001223- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1224 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1225 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001226
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001227- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1228 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1229
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001230- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1231 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1232 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1233
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001234- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1235
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001236Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001237-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001238
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001239- Added three operators to the operator module:
1240 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1241 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1242 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1243
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001244- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1245
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001246- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1247 archives.
1248
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001249- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1250 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1251 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1252
1253 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1254
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001255- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1256 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1257 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001258 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001259
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001260- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1261 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1262 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1263 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001264 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1265 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1266 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1267 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001268
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001269- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1270 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001271
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001272- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1273
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001274- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1275 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1276
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001277- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1278 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1279 supported.
1280
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001281- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1282
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001283- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1284 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001285
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001286- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1287 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1288
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001289- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1290
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001291- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1292 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1293
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001294- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1295 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1296 functions but callable type objects.
1297
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001298- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001299 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001300 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001301
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001302- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1303 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001304
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001305- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1306 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001307
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001308- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1309 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1310 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1311 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1312
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001313- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1314 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001315
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001316- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1317 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1318 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1319 and __imul__.
1320
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001321- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001322 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1323 is called.
1324
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001325- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1326 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1327 interpreter was compiled.
1328
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001329- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1330 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1331 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001332 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001333 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1334 1, not 2.
1335
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001336- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1337 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1338 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1339 limit.
1340
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001341- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1342 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1343 bug #623464.
1344
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001345- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1346 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1347 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1348 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1349
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001350Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001351-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001352
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001353- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1354
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001355- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1356 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1357 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1358 with Python 2.3a2.
1359
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001360- os.path exposes getctime.
1361
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001362- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001363 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001364 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001365 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001366 unit tests of floating point results.
1367
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001368- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1369 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1370 has been increased.
1371
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001372- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1373 executed.
1374
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001375- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1376 postinstallation script.
1377
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001378- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1379 test the current module.
1380
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001381- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001382 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1383 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1384 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1385 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1386
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001387- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001388 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001389 Ward's Optik package.
1390
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001391- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1392 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1393 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1394 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1395
1396- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1397 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001398 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001399
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001400- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1401 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1402 shelf are binary pickles.
1403
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001404- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1405 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1406
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001407- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1408 modules are iterators now.
1409
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001410- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1411 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1412 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1413 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1414 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1415 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001416
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001417- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1418 with their entity value.
1419
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001420- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1421
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001422- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1423 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001424
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001425- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1426 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001427 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001428
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001429- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1430 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1431 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1432 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1433 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1434 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1435 main():
1436
1437 import locale
1438 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1439
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001440- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1441 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1442
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001443- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1444 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1445 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1446 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1447 to the new standard.
1448
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001449- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1450 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1451 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1452 an extension to the database.
1453
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001454- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1455 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1456 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1457 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001458 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001459
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001460- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001461 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001462
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001463- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1464 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1465 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1466 bounded integers.
1467
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001468- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1469 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1470 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1471 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1472 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1473 in existence.
1474
1475 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1476 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1477 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1478 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1479 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1480 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1481
1482 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1483 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1484 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1485 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1486
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001487- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1488 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1489 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1490
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001491- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1492
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001493- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1494 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1495 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1496 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1497
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001498- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1499 argument.
1500
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001501- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1502 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1503 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1504 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1505 [SF patch 560794].
1506
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001507- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1508 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1509 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001510 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1511 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1512 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001513
1514- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1515 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001516
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001517- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1518 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1519 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1520 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001521
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001522- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1523 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1524 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1525 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1526 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1527
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001528- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001529
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001530- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1531
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001532- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1533 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1534 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1535 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1536 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1537 identical to None.
1538
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001539- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1540 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1541 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1542 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1543 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1544 results now.
1545
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001546- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1547 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1548
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001549- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1550 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1551 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1552 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1553 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1554 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1555 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1556 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1557
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001558- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1559
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001560- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1561 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1562
1563- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1564 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1565 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1566 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1567 and other systems.
1568
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001569- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1570 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1571 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1572 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 +00001573 work well with these.
1574
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001575- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1576
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001577- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001578 connections.
1579
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001580- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1581 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1582 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1583
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001584- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1585 sets
1586
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001587- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1588 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1589 name.
1590
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001591- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1592 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1593 passed in.
1594
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001595- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001596 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001597 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1598 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001599
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001600- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1601
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001602- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1603
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001604- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1605 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1606 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1607
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001608- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1609 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1610 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1611 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001612 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001613
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001614- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001615 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001616 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001617
1618- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1619 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1620 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1621
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001622- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001623 the value of its expression argument.
1624
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001625- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1626 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1627 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1628
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001629- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1630 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1631 skipstone browser was included.
1632
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001633- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1634 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1635
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001636Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001637-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001638
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001639- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1640 names in addition to accepting file names.
1641
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001642- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1643 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1644 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1645 still used and useful.)
1646
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001647- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1648 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1649 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1650 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001651
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001652- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1653 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1654 the generated binary.
1655
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001656Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001657-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001658
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001659- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1660
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001661- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1662 except in the hands of experts.
1663
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001664- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001665 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1666 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1667 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001668
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001669- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1670 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1671 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1672 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1673 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1674 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1675 builds.
1676
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001677- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1678 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1679 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1680 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1681 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1682 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1683 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1684 new type.
1685
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001686- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001687
1688 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1689 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1690 positive infinities.
1691
1692 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1693 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1694 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1695 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1696 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1697 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1698 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1699
1700 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1701
1702 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1703
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001704- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1705 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1706 size of the executable.
1707
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001708- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1709 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1710 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1711 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001712
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001713- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1714
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001715- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1716 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1717 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001718
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001719- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1720 well as Unix.
1721
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001722- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1723 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1724 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1725 modules in the README file for details.
1726
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001727C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001728-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001729
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001730- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1731 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001732 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001733 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001734 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001735
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001736- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1737 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1738 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1739 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1740 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1741 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001742 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001743 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1744 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1745 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1746 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1747 aligned.)
1748
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001749- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1750 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1751 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1752
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001753- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1754 level.
1755
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001756- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1757 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1758 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1759 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1760 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1761
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001762- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1763 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1764 code.
1765
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001766- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1767 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1768 adjusting for negative indices.
1769
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001770- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1771 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1772 object.
1773
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001774- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1775 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1776 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1777
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001778- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1779 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001780
1781- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1782
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001783- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1784 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1785 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1786 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1787
1788- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1789
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001790- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001791
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001792- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001793 without going through the buffer API.
1794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001795- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001796
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001797- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1798 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1799 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1800 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1801
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001802- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1803 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1804
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001805- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001806 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1807
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001808New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001809-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001810
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001811- OpenVMS is now supported.
1812
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001813- AtheOS is now supported.
1814
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001815- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1816
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001817- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1818
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001819Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001820-----
1821
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001822- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1823 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1824 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001825
1826Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001827-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001828
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001829- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1830 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1831 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1832 bugs.
1833 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001834 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001835 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1836 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001837 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001838
1839- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001840 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001841
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001842- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1843 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1844
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001845- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1846 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001847 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001848 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1849
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001850- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1851 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1852 use files" uninstall option).
1853
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001854- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1855
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001856- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1857 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1858
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001859- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1860 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1861 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1862
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001863- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1864 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1865 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1866 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1867 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001868 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1869 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1870 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001871
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001872- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001873 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001874 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1875 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1876 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1877 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1878 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1879 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1880 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1881 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1882 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1883 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1884 work around.
1885
1886- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1887 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1888 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1889 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1890 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1891 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1892 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1893 specified with O_CREAT too).
1894
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001895Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001896----
1897
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001898- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001899
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001900- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1901 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1902 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1903
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001904- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1905 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1906 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1907
1908- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1909 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1910 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1911 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1912 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1913 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1914 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1915 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001916
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001917- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1918 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1919 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001920
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001921- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1922 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1923 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1924 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1925 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001926
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001927- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1928 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1929 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001930
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001931- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1932 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001933
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001934- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1935 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1936 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1937 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1938 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001939
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001940- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1941 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1942 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1943
1944- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1945 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1946 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001947
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001948- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1949 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1950 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1951 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001952 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001953
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001954- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1955 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001956
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001957- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1958 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001959
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001960- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001961 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001962 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1963 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001964
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001965
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001966What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001967===============================
1968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001969*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1970
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001971Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001972--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001973
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001974- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1975 with a custom metaclass.
1976
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001977Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001978-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001979
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001980- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1981 are proxies.
1982
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001983Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001984-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001985
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001986- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1987 very short strings.
1988
1989- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1990 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1991 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1992 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1993 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1994
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001995Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001996-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001997
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001998- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1999 close or delete time).
2000
2001- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2002 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2003
2004- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2005
2006- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002007 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002008
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002009Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002010-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002011
2012Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002013-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002014
2015C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002016-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002017
2018New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002019-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002020
2021Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002022-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002023
2024Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002025-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002026
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002027- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2028
2029- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2030 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2031
2032- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2033 deleted at process exit time.
2034
2035- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2036 in backslash.
2037
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002038Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002039----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002040
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002041- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2042 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2043 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2044
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002045
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002046What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002047===========================
2048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002049*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2050
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002051Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002052--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002053
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002054- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2055 been extensively updated. See
2056
2057 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2058
2059 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2060
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002061- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2062 deleted!
2063
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002064- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2065 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2066 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2067 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2068 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2069
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002070- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2071
2072 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2073 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2074
2075 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2076 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2077 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2078 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2079 supported anyway.
2080
2081 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2082 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2083
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002084- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2085 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2086 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2087 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2088 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002089
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002090- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2091 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2092 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2093
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002094Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002095-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002096
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002097- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2098 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2099 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2100 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2101 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2102 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002103 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2104 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2105 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2106 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002107
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002108- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2109 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2110 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2111
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002112Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002113-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002114
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002115- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2116
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002117Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002118-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002119
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002120- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2121 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2122 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2123 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2124 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2125 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2126
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002127- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2128
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002129- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2130
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002131- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2132
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002133- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2134 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2135 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2136
2137- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2138
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002139Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002140-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002141
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002142- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2143 off a search on Google.
2144
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002145Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002147
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002148- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2149 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2150 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2151 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2152 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2153 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2154 other platforms should do likewise.
2155
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002156- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2157 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2158 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2159
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002160C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002161-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002162
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002163- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2164 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2165 producing key-value pairs.
2166
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002167- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002168 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002169 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2170 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2171 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2172 previously went unchallenged.
2173
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002174New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002175-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002176
2177Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002178-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002179
2180Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002181-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002182
2183Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002184----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002185
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002186- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2187 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002188
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002189- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2190 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2191 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2192 home.
2193
2194
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002195What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002196===========================
2197
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002198*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2199
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002200Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002201--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002202
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002203- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2204 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002205
2206 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002207 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002208
2209 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2210 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002211 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002212 This needs to be documented.
2213
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002214- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2215 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2216
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002217- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2218 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2219 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2220
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002221- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2222 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2223
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002224- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2225 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2226 class forbids it).
2227
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002228- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2229 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2230 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2231
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002232- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2233
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002234Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002235-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002236
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002237- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2238 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002239 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002240
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002241- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2242 (like 1 + '').
2243
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002244Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002245-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002246
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002247- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2248 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2249 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2250 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002251 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002252 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2253
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002254- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2255 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2256 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2257 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2258
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002259- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2260 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002261 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2262 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2263 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002264
2265- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2266 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002267
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002268- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2269 bytes on its input.
2270
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002271Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002272-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002273
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002274- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002275 convenience function.
2276
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002277- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2278 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2279 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002280 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2281 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2282 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2283 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2284 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2285 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002286
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002287- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2288 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2289 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2290 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2291
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002292- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2293 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2294 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2295
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002296- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2297 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2298 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2299 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2300
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002301- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2302 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002303 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002304 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2305 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2306 new -l and -e options.
2307
2308- statcache is now deprecated.
2309
2310- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2311 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002312 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002313 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2314 time properly taken into account.
2315
2316- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2317 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2318 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2319 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2320
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002321Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002322-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002323
2324Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002325-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002326
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002327- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2328 is built with libdb3 if available.
2329
2330- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2331
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002332C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002333-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002334
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002335- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2336 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2337 PySequence_Size().
2338
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002339- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2340
2341- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2342 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2343 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2344
2345- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2346 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2347
2348- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2349 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2350
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002351New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002352-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002353
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002354- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2355 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2356
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002357- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2358 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2359
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002360- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002362Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002363-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002364
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002365- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2366 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2367
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002368Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002369-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002370
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002371Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002372----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002373
2374- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2375 removed completely in the next release.
2376
2377- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2378 OSX.
2379
2380- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2381 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2382
2383- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2384
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002385
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002386What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002387===========================
2388
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002389*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2390
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002391Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002392--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002393
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002394- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002395 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002396 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002397 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2398 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002399 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2400 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002401 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2402 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002403
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002404- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2405 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2406
2407- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2408 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2409
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002410Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002411-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002412
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002413- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2414 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2415 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2416 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2417 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2418 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2419 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2420 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2421
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002422- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2423 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2424 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2425 example).
2426
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002427- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002428 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002429 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002430 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002431
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002432- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2433 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2434 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002435 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002436
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002437- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2438 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2439 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2440 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2441 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2442 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2443
2444 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2445
2446 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2447
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002448Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002449-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002450
2451- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2452
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002453- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2454
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002455- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2456 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002457
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002458- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2459 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2460 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2461 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2462 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2463 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002464 attributes.
2465
2466- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2467 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2468 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002469
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002470- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2471 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2472 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002473
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002474- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2475 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2476 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002477 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2478 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2479
2480- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2481 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002482
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002483Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002484-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002485
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002486- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2487 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2488
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002489- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2490 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2491 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2492 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2493
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002494- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2495 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2496 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2497 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2498
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002499 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2500 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2501 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2502 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2503 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2504 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2505 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2506 without losing information).
2507
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002508- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002509 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2510 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2511 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2512 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2513 module).
2514
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002515 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002516 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2517 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2518 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2519 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002520
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002521- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002522 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2523 encoding.
2524
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002525- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2526 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2527
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002528- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002529 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2530
2531- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2532 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2533 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2534 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2535
2536- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2537
2538- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2539 ON, and OFF.
2540
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002541- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2542 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2543
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002544Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002545-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002546
2547- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2548 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2549 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002550
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002551- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2552 been added: -X and -E.
2553
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002554Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002555-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002556
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002557- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2558 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2559
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002560C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002561-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002562
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002563- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2564 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2565 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2566 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2567 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2568
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002569- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2570 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2571 as long) arguments.
2572
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002573- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2574 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2575 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2576 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2577 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2578 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2579
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002580- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2581 input.
2582
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002583New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002584-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002585
2586Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002587-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002588
2589Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002590-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002591
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002592- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2593 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2594 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2595
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002596- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2597 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2598 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002599 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002600
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002601 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2602 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2603 import signal
2604 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002605
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002607 while 1:
2608 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002609 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002610 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2611 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2612 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2613 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002614
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002615
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002616What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2617===========================
2618
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002619*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2620
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002621Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002622--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002623
2624- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2625 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2626 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2627
2628- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2629 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2630 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2631 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2632 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2633 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2634 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002635
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002636- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002637 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002638 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2639 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2640 associate a docstring with a property.
2641
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002642- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2643 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2644 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2645 other built-in object types.
2646
2647- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2648 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2649 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2650 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2651 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2652
2653- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2654 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2655
2656- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2657 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002658 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002659 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2660 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2661 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2662 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2663 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2664
2665- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2666 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2667 class.
2668
2669- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2670 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2671 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2672 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2673
2674- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2675 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2676 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2677 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2678
2679- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2680 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2681
2682- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2683 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2684 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2685 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2686 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002687 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002688 with the same value as s.
2689
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002690- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2691
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002692Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002693----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002694
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002695- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2696
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002697- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2698 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2699 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2700 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2701 objects.
2702
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002703- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2704 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002705 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2706 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2707
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002708- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2709 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2710 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2711
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002712Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002714
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002715- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2716 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2717 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2718 by the instances.
2719
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002720- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2721 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2722 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2723
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002724- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2725 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2726 before the entire comparison is complete.
2727
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002728- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2729 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2730 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2731
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002732- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2733 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2734 getwriter().
2735
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002736- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2737 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2738
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002739- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002740 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2741 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2742
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002743- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2744 iterable object.
2745
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002746- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2747 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002748
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002749- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2750 authentication.
2751
2752- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2753 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002754
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002755- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002756 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2757 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2758 a sample driver.)
2759
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002760Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002761-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002762
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002763- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2764 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2765 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2766 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2767 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2768 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2769 kernel has large file support.
2770
2771- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2772 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2773 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2774 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2775 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2776
2777- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2778 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2779 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2780
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002781C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002782-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002783
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002784- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2785 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2786
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002787New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002788-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002789
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002790- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2791 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2792
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002793Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002795
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002796- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2797 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2798 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2799 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2800 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2801
2802- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2803 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2804 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2805 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2806
2807- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2808 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2809
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002810Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002812
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002813- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002814 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2815 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002816
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002817
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002818What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2819===========================
2820
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002821*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2822
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002823Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002824----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002825
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002826- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2827 big to represent as a C double.
2828
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002829- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2830 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2831 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2832 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2833 restriction).
2834
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002835- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2836 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2837 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2838 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2839 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2840
2841 >>> dir([])
2842 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2843 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2844 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2845 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2846 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2847 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2848 'reverse', 'sort']
2849
2850 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2851
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002852- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002853 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2854 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2855 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2856 OverflowError exception.
2857
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002858- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002859 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002860 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2861 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2862 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2863 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2864 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002865 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2867 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2868
2869 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2870 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2871 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2872 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002873
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002874- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002875 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2876 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2877 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2878 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2879 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2880 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2881 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2882 once it is created.
2883
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002884- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2885 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2886 (key, value) pairs.
2887
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002888- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002889 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2890 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2891
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002892- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2893 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2894 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2895 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2896 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002897
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002898- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002899 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2900 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2901
2902 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2903
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002904- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002905 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2906
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002907Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002908-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002909
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002910- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002911 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2912 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002913
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002914- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2915 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2916 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2917 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2918 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2919 in this area anymore).
2920
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002921- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2922 threading.Timer.
2923
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002924- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2925 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2926
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002927- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002928 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2929
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002930- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002931 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2932 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2933 converted to Python longs.
2934
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002935- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002936 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2937
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002938- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2939 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2940 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2941
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002942Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002944
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002945- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2946 division operators as per PEP 238.
2947
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002948Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002949-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002950
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002951- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2952 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2953 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2954 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2955
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002956C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002957-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002958
2959- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002960
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002961- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2962 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002963 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002964
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002965 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2966 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002967 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002968 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002969
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002970- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002971 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2972 module:
2973
2974 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002975
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002976 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2977 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002978
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002979 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2980 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002981
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002982 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2983
2984 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2985
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002986- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002987 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2988 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2989 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002990
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002991New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002993
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002994- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2995 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2996 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2997 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2998 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002999
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003000Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003002
3003Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003004-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003005
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003006- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3007 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3008 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3009 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003010 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3011 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3012 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3013 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3014 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003015
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003016- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003017 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3018
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003019
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003020What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3021===========================
3022
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3024
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003025Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003027
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003028- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3029 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3030
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003031- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3032 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3033 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003034
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003035- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3036 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3037 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3038 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003039
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003040- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3041
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003042- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003043
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003044Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003045-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003046
3047- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003048 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003049 the module docstring for details.
3050
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003052-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003053
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003054- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003055 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3056 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3057 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003058
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003059- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3060 Nick Mathewson.
3061
3062Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003063----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003064
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003065- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3066 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3067 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3068 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3069 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3070 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3071 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3072 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3073
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003074- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3075 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3076 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3077 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3078
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003079- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3080 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3081 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3082 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3083 come a long way).
3084
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003085- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3086 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3087 write filters for these warnings).
3088
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003089- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3090 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3091 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3092 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3093 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3094
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003095- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3096 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3097 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3098 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3099 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3100 older distribution.
3101
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003102Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003103-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003104
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003105- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3106 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003107 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003108
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003109- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3110 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3111 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3112
3113- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3114
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003115- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3116
3117- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3118
3119- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3120
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003121- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003122
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003123- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3124
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003125New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003127
3128C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003130
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003131- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3132 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3133 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3134 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3135 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3136 against buffer overruns.
3137
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003138- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003139 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3140 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003141 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3142 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3143 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3144
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003145- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3146 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3147 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3148 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3149 deprecated.
3150
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003151Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003152-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003153
3154- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3155 relevant is found.
3156
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003157
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003158What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003159===========================
3160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003161*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3162
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003163Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003165
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003166- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3167 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3168 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3169 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3170 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3171 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3172 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3173 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003174 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003175 repaired.
3176
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003177- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003178 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003179 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3180 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3181 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3182 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3183 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3184 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3185 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3186 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3187
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003188- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3189 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3190 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3191 leading BMO character).
3192
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003193- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3194 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3195 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3196
3197 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3198 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3199 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003200
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003201 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3202 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3203 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3204 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3205 for various simple to use conversions.
3206
3207 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3208 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3209
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3211 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3212 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3213 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3214 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3215 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3216 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3217 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3218 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3219 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3220 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3221 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3222 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3223 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3224 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003225
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003226- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3227 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3228 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003229 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003230 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003231
3232 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003233 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3234 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3235 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3236 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3237 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003238 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3239 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003240
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003241 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3242 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3243 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003244 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003245
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003246- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3247 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3248 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3249 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3250 floating arithmetic,
3251
3252 x = 9007199254740992.0
3253 print long(x)
3254
3255 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3256 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3257 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3258 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3259 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3260 functions are of good quality).
3261
3262 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3263 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3264 algorithms to break.
3265
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003266- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3267 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3268 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3269 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3270 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3271 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3272 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3273 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3274 order.
3275
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003276- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3277 operation along the most common code paths.
3278
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003279- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3280 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3281
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003282- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3283 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3284 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3285 {}.update(UserDict())
3286
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003287- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3288 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3289 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3290 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3291 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3292 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3293 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3294 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3295
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003296- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003297 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003299 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003300 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3301 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003302 join() method of strings
3303 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003304 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3305 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003307 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003308
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003309- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3310 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3311
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003312- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3313 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3314
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003315- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3316 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3317 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3318 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3319
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003320- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3321 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003322 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003323 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3324 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003325
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003326- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3327
3328
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003331
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003332- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003333 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003334 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3335 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3336
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003337- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3338 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3339
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003340- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3341 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3342 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3343 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3344
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003345- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3346 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3347 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3348
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003349- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3350
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003351- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3352
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003353- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3354 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3355 that are still imported into string.py).
3356
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003357- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3358
3359- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3360 Now it does.
3361
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003362- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3363
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003364- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3365 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3366 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3367 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3368 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003369 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3370 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003371
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003372- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3373 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3374 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3375 'help(object)'.
3376
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003377Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003379
3380- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003381 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003382 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3383 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3384
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003385- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003386 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3387 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003388
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003389C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003390-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003391
3392- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3393 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394
3395----
3396
3397**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**