blob: 0ee20460f539d2e22d465ede6bfcd5d72860c5f9 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
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
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +000087- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
88 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
89 module. A function registered with the threading module will
90 be used for all threads it creates.
91
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +000092- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
93 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
94 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +000095 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +000096
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +000097- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
98
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +000099- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
100 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
101 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
102 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
103
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000104- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
105 handling.
106
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000107- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
108 __doc__ of data descriptors.
109
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000110- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
111 in socket.py.
112
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000113- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
114
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000115- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
116 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
117 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
118 opener with proxy support.
119
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000120Tools/Demos
121-----------
122
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000123- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
124
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000125- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
126
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000127- diff.py is a new script for print file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff
128 formats. Provides an alternate command line interface to difflib.py.
129
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000130- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
131 files.
132
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000133Build
134-----
135
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000136- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
137 different root directory.
138
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000139C API
140-----
141
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000142- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
143 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
144 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
145 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
146 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
147 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
148 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
149 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
150 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
151 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
152
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000153New platforms
154-------------
155
156None this time.
157
158Tests
159-----
160
161- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
162 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
163
164Windows
165-------
166
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000167- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
168 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
169 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
170 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
171 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
172 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
173 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
174 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
175 that's what it's for.
176
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000177Mac
178---
179
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000180- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
181 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
182 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
183 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000184- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
185 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
186- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000187
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000188What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
189================================
190
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000191*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000192
193Core and builtins
194-----------------
195
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000196- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
197 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
198
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000199- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
200 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
201 and cannot be strings).
202
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000203- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
204 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
205 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
206 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
207
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000208- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
209 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
210 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
211 Python itself.
212
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000213- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
214 the referenced object, if it has one.
215
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000216- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
217 the thread started at
218 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
219
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000220- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
221 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
222 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
223 placed on a list index.
224
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000225- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
226 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
227 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
228 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
229
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000230- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
231 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
232 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
233 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
234 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
235 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
236 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
237
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000238- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
239 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
240 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
241 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
242 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
243
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000244- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
245 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000246
247- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
248 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
249 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
250 #693195.)
251
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000252- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
253 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000254
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000255- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000256 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000257 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
258 interpreter executions, would fail.
259
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000260- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000261 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000262 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000263
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000264Extension modules
265-----------------
266
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000267- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
268 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
269 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
270 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
271
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000272- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
273 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
274
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000275- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
276 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
277 and Greg Chapman.)
278
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000279- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
280 recursively.
281
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000282- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000283 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
284 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
285 leaks.
286
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000287- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
288
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000289- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
290 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
291 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
292 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
293 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
294 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
295 #705836.
296
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000297- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
298 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
299
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000300- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
301 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
302 See SF bug #692416.
303
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000304- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
305 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
306
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000307- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
308 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
309 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000310
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000311- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000312 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
313 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
314
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000315- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
316 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
317 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
318 timeouts to work properly.
319
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000320Library
321-------
322
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000323- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
324 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
325 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
326 future release.
327
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000328- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
329 for querying platform dependent features.
330
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000331- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000332
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000333- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
334 pickle protocol versions.
335
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000336- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
337 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
338 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
339
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000340- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
341
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000342- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
343 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
344 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
345 modules.
346
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000347- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
348 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
349 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
350
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000351- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
352 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
353
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000354- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
355 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
356 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
357
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000358- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000359 MS Office extensions.
360
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000361- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
362 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
363
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000364- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
365 execution speed of expressions and statements.
366
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000367- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
368 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
369 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
370 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
371 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
372 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
373
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000374- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
375 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
376 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000377
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000378- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
379 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
380 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
381
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000382- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
383
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000384- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
385 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
386 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
387
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000388Tools/Demos
389-----------
390
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000391- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
392 See the module docstring for details.
393
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000394Build
395-----
396
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000397- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
398 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000399
400C API
401-----
402
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000403- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
404
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000405- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
406 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
407 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
408
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000409- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
410 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000411
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000412 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
413 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
414 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000415
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000416- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000417 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
418
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000419- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
420 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
421 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000422
423New platforms
424-------------
425
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000426None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000427
428Tests
429-----
430
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000431- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
432 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000433
434Windows
435-------
436
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000437- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
438 function.
439
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000440- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
441 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000442
443Mac
444---
445
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000446- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
447 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000448
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000449- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
450 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000451
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000452- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
453 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
454 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000455
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000456- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000457 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
458 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000459
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000460- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
461 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000462
463
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000464What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
465=================================
466
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000467*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000468
469Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000470-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000471
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000472- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
473 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
474 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
475
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000476- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
477 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
478 (SF patch #664376.)
479
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000480- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
481 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
482 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
483 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
484 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
485 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000486 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000487
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000488- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
489 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
490 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
491 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000492 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000493
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000494- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
495 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
496 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
497 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
498 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
499 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
500 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
501 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
502 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
503 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
504 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
505
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000506- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
507 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
508 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
509 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
510 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
511 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
512
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000513- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
514 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
515
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000516- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
517 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
518 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
519 case.)
520
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000521- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
522 passed as unicode strings.
523
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000524- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
525 See SF bug #683467.
526
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000527- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
528 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
529
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000530- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
531
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000532- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
533
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000534- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
535 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
536 arguments.
537
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000538- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
539 See SF bug #667147.
540
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000541- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000542 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000543 See SF bug #676155.
544
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000545- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000546 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000547 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
548 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
549 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
550 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
551 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
552 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000553
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000554Extension modules
555-----------------
556
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000557- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
558 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
559 tp_as_number pointer.
560
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000561- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
562 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
563 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
564 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
565 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
566
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000567- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
568
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000569- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
570
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000571- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000572 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000573 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
574 patch #678531.)
575
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000576- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
577 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
578
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000579- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
580 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
581
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000582- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
583
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000584- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
585 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
586 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
587
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000588- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
589
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000590- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
591 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
592
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000593- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000594
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000595- datetime changes:
596
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000597 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
598
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000599 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
600 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
601 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
602 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
603 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
604 now.
605
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000606 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000607 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
608 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000609
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000610 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000611 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000612 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
613 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
614 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
615 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000616
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000617 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
618 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
619 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000620 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
621
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000622 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
623 by a later example coded by Guido.
624
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000625 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000626 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
627 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
628 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000629 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
630 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
631
632 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
633 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
634 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
635 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
636 tzinfo subclass instance.
637
638 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
639 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
640 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
641 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
642 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
643 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
644 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
645 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000646
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000647 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
648 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
649 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
650 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
651 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000652 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
653
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000654 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000655
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000656 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
657 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
658 as a naive datetime object.
659
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000660 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
661 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
662 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
663
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000664 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
665 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
666 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
667 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
668 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
669 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
670 comparison.
671
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000672 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
673 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
674 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
675 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000676 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000677
678 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000679
680 and ::
681
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000682 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
683
684 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
685 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
686 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
687 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
688
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000689 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
690 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
691 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
692 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
693 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
694
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000695 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
696 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000697 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
698 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000699
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000700Library
701-------
702
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000703- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
704 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
705
706- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
707 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
708 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
709 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
710 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
711 See PEP 307 for details.
712
713- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
714 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
715
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000716- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
717 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000718 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000719 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
720 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000721 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000722
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000723- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
724 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
725
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000726- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
727 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
728 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
729
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000730- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
731
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000732- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
733 exception.
734
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000735- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
736 class.
737
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000738- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
739 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
740 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
741
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000742- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
743 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
744
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000745- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000746 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
747 See SF bug #659228.
748
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000749- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
750 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
751 See SF patch #651082.
752
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000753- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000754
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000755- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
756 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
757
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000758- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000759 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000760
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000761- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
762 DOS paths from other platforms.
763
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000764Tools/Demos
765-----------
766
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000767- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
768 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
769 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
770 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
771 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
772 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
773 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
774 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
775 example:
776
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000777 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
778 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000779
780 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
781
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000782
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000783Build
784-----
785
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000786- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
787 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
788 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000789 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
790
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000791 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
792
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000793- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
794 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
795 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
796 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
797 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
798 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
799 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
800 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
801 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
802
803- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
804 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
805 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
806 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
807
808- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
809 from the Tools/scripts directory.
810
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000811C API
812-----
813
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000814- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
815 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000816
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000817- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
818 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
819 tp_as_number pointer.
820
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000821- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
822 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
823 (SF #681367)
824
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000825- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
826 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
827 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
828 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000829
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000830Tests
831-----
832
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000833- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000834 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
835 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
836 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
837 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
838 pydoc.)
839
840- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
841
842- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000843
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000844Windows
845-------
846
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000847- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
848 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
849 time).
850
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000851- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
852 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
853
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000854- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
855 release without strong cryptography.
856
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000857- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000858 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000859
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000860- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
861 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
862
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000863Mac
864---
865
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000866- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
867 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000868
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000869- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
870 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
871 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000872
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000873- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
874 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000875
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000876- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
877 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
878 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
879 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000880
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000881- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000882 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
883 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
884 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000885
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000886
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000887What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000888=================================
889
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000890*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000891
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000892Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000893--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000894
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000895- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
896
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000897- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
898 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000899 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000900 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000901 a different meaning than before.
902
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000903- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000904 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000905 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000906
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000907- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000908 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000909 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000910
911- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
912 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
913 and deallocation.
914
915- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
916 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
917
918- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
919 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
920 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
921 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
922 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
923
924- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
925 now detected by the garbage collector.
926
927- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
928 [SF bug 519621]
929
930- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
931 identifier.
932
933- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
934 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
935 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
936 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
937 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
938 [SF bug 563060]
939
940- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
941 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
942 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
943 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
944 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
945
946- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
947 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
948 not called. [SF bug #537450]
949
950- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
951
952- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
953 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
954 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
955 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
956 state of the slots would be lost.)
957
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000958Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000959-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000960
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000961- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000962 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
963 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
964 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
965 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000966 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
967 Jython 2.1.
968
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000969- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000970 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000971 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
972 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
973 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
974 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
975 these, see PEP 302.
976
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000977- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
978 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
979 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
980
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000981- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
982 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
983 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
984
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000985- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
986 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
987 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
988
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000989- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
990 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
991 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
992 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
993 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
994 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
995 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
996 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
997 releases or implementations.
998
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000999- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001000 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1001 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001002
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001003- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1004 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1005
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001006- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1007 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1008 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1009
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001010- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1011 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1012
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001013- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1014 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001015 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1016 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001017
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001018- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1019 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1020 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1021 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1022 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1023
1024 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1025 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1026 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1027 pattern.
1028
1029 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1030 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1031 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1032 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1033
1034 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1035 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1036 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1037 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1038 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1039 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1040
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001041- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1042 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1043 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1044 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1045 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1046 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1047 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1048 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001049
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001050- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1051 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1052 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1053 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1054 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001055 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1056 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1057 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1058 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1059 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1060 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1061 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001062
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001063- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1064 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1065
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001066- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1067 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1068 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1069 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1070 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1071 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1072 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1073 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1074 to Zack Weinberg!
1075
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001076- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1077 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1078 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1079 type. This has been fixed now.
1080
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001081- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1082 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1083 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1084
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001085- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1086 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1087 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1088 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1089 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1090 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1091 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1092 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001093 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001094
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001095- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1096 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1097 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001098
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001099- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1100 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1101 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1102 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1103 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1104 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1105 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1106 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001107 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001108 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1109 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1110
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001111- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1112 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1113 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1114 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1115 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1116 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1117 this.)
1118
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001119- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1120 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001121 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001122 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001123 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1124 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001125 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1126 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001127
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001128- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1129 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1130 currently running.
1131
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001132- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1133 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1134 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1135 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1136
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001137- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1138 as directory names.
1139
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001140- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1141 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1142
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001143- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1144 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1145
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001146- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001147 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1148 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001149
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001150- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1151 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1152 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1153 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1154 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1155
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001156- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1157 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1158 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1159 removed.
1160
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001161- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1162 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1163 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1164
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001165- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1166 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1167 to __debug__.
1168
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001169- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1170 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1171 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1172
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001173- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1174 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1175 deprecated now.
1176
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001177- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1178 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1179 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001180
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001181- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1182 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1183 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1184 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1185 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001186
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001187- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1188 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1189
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001190- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1191 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1192 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001193 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001194 is backward compatible.
1195
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001196- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1197 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1198 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1199 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1200 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1201
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001202- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1203 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1204 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1205 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1206 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1207 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001208
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001209- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1210 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1211
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001212- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1213 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1214
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001215- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1216 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1217 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1218 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1219 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1220
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001221- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1222 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1223 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1224
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001225- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001226 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1227
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001228- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1229 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1230 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001231
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001232- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1233 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1234
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001235- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1236 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1237 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1238
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001239- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1240
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001241Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001242-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001243
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001244- Added three operators to the operator module:
1245 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1246 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1247 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1248
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001249- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1250
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001251- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1252 archives.
1253
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001254- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1255 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1256 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1257
1258 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1259
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001260- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1261 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1262 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001263 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001264
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001265- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1266 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1267 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1268 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001269 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1270 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1271 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1272 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001273
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001274- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1275 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001276
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001277- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1278
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001279- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1280 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1281
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001282- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1283 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1284 supported.
1285
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001286- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1287
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001288- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1289 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001290
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001291- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1292 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1293
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001294- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1295
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001296- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1297 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1298
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001299- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1300 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1301 functions but callable type objects.
1302
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001303- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001304 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001305 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001306
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001307- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1308 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001309
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001310- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1311 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001312
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001313- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1314 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1315 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1316 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1317
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001318- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1319 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001320
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001321- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1322 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1323 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1324 and __imul__.
1325
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001326- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001327 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1328 is called.
1329
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001330- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1331 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1332 interpreter was compiled.
1333
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001334- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1335 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1336 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001337 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001338 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1339 1, not 2.
1340
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001341- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1342 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1343 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1344 limit.
1345
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001346- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1347 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1348 bug #623464.
1349
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001350- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1351 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1352 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1353 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1354
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001355Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001356-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001357
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001358- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1359
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001360- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1361 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1362 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1363 with Python 2.3a2.
1364
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001365- os.path exposes getctime.
1366
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001367- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001368 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001369 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001370 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001371 unit tests of floating point results.
1372
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001373- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1374 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1375 has been increased.
1376
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001377- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1378 executed.
1379
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001380- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1381 postinstallation script.
1382
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001383- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1384 test the current module.
1385
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001386- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001387 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1388 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1389 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1390 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1391
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001392- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001393 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001394 Ward's Optik package.
1395
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001396- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1397 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1398 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1399 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1400
1401- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1402 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001403 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001404
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001405- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1406 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1407 shelf are binary pickles.
1408
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001409- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1410 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1411
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001412- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1413 modules are iterators now.
1414
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001415- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1416 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1417 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1418 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1419 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1420 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001421
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001422- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1423 with their entity value.
1424
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001425- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1426
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001427- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1428 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001429
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001430- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1431 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001432 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001433
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001434- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1435 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1436 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1437 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1438 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1439 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1440 main():
1441
1442 import locale
1443 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1444
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001445- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1446 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1447
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001448- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1449 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1450 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1451 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1452 to the new standard.
1453
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001454- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1455 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1456 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1457 an extension to the database.
1458
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001459- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1460 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1461 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1462 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001463 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001464
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001465- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001466 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001467
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001468- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1469 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1470 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1471 bounded integers.
1472
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001473- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1474 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1475 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1476 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1477 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1478 in existence.
1479
1480 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1481 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1482 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1483 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1484 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1485 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1486
1487 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1488 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1489 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1490 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1491
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001492- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1493 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1494 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1495
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001496- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1497
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001498- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1499 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1500 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1501 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1502
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001503- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1504 argument.
1505
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001506- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1507 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1508 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1509 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1510 [SF patch 560794].
1511
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001512- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1513 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1514 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001515 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1516 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1517 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001518
1519- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1520 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001521
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001522- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1523 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1524 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1525 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001526
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001527- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1528 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1529 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1530 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1531 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1532
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001533- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001534
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001535- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1536
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001537- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1538 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1539 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1540 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1541 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1542 identical to None.
1543
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001544- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1545 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1546 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1547 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1548 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1549 results now.
1550
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001551- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1552 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1553
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001554- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1555 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1556 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1557 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1558 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1559 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1560 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1561 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1562
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001563- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1564
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001565- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1566 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1567
1568- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1569 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1570 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1571 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1572 and other systems.
1573
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001574- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1575 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1576 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1577 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 +00001578 work well with these.
1579
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001580- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1581
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001582- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001583 connections.
1584
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001585- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1586 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1587 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1588
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001589- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1590 sets
1591
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001592- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1593 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1594 name.
1595
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001596- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1597 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1598 passed in.
1599
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001600- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001601 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001602 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1603 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001604
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001605- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1606
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001607- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1608
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001609- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1610 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1611 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1612
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001613- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1614 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1615 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1616 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001617 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001618
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001619- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001620 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001621 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001622
1623- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1624 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1625 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1626
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001627- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001628 the value of its expression argument.
1629
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001630- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1631 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1632 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1633
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001634- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1635 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1636 skipstone browser was included.
1637
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001638- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1639 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1640
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001641Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001642-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001643
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001644- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1645 names in addition to accepting file names.
1646
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001647- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1648 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1649 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1650 still used and useful.)
1651
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001652- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1653 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1654 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1655 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001656
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001657- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1658 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1659 the generated binary.
1660
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001661Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001662-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001663
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001664- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1665
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001666- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1667 except in the hands of experts.
1668
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001669- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001670 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1671 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1672 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001673
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001674- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1675 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1676 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1677 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1678 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1679 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1680 builds.
1681
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001682- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1683 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1684 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1685 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1686 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1687 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1688 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1689 new type.
1690
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001691- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001692
1693 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1694 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1695 positive infinities.
1696
1697 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1698 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1699 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1700 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1701 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1702 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1703 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1704
1705 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1706
1707 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1708
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001709- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1710 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1711 size of the executable.
1712
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001713- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1714 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1715 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1716 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001717
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001718- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1719
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001720- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1721 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1722 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001723
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001724- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1725 well as Unix.
1726
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001727- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1728 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1729 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1730 modules in the README file for details.
1731
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001732C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001733-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001734
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001735- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1736 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001737 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001738 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001739 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001740
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001741- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1742 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1743 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1744 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1745 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1746 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001747 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001748 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1749 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1750 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1751 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1752 aligned.)
1753
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001754- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1755 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1756 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1757
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001758- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1759 level.
1760
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001761- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1762 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1763 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1764 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1765 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1766
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001767- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1768 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1769 code.
1770
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001771- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1772 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1773 adjusting for negative indices.
1774
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001775- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1776 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1777 object.
1778
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001779- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1780 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1781 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1782
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001783- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1784 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001785
1786- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1787
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001788- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1789 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1790 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1791 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1792
1793- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1794
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001795- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001796
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001797- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001798 without going through the buffer API.
1799
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001800- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001801
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001802- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1803 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1804 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1805 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1806
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001807- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1808 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1809
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001810- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001811 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1812
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001813New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001814-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001815
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001816- OpenVMS is now supported.
1817
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001818- AtheOS is now supported.
1819
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001820- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1821
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001822- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1823
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001824Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001825-----
1826
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001827- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1828 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1829 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001830
1831Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001832-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001833
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001834- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1835 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1836 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1837 bugs.
1838 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001839 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001840 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1841 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001842 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001843
1844- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001845 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001846
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001847- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1848 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1849
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001850- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1851 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001852 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001853 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1854
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001855- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1856 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1857 use files" uninstall option).
1858
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001859- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1860
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001861- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1862 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1863
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001864- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1865 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1866 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1867
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001868- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1869 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1870 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1871 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1872 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001873 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1874 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1875 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001876
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001877- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001878 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001879 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1880 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1881 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1882 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1883 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1884 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1885 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1886 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1887 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1888 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1889 work around.
1890
1891- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1892 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1893 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1894 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1895 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1896 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1897 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1898 specified with O_CREAT too).
1899
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001900Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001901----
1902
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001903- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001904
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001905- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1906 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1907 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1908
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001909- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1910 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1911 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1912
1913- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1914 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1915 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1916 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1917 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1918 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1919 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1920 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001921
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001922- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1923 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1924 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001925
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001926- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1927 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1928 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1929 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1930 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001931
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001932- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1933 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1934 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001935
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001936- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1937 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001938
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001939- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1940 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1941 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1942 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1943 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001944
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001945- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1946 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1947 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1948
1949- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1950 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1951 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001952
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001953- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1954 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1955 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1956 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001957 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001958
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001959- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1960 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001961
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001962- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1963 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001964
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001965- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001966 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001967 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1968 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001969
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001970
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001971What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001972===============================
1973
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001974*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1975
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001976Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001977--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001978
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001979- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1980 with a custom metaclass.
1981
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001982Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001983-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001984
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001985- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1986 are proxies.
1987
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001988Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001989-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001990
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001991- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1992 very short strings.
1993
1994- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1995 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1996 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1997 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1998 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1999
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002000Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002001-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002002
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002003- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2004 close or delete time).
2005
2006- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2007 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2008
2009- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2010
2011- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002012 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002013
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002014Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002015-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002016
2017Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002018-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002019
2020C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002021-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002022
2023New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002024-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002025
2026Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002027-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002028
2029Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002030-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002031
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002032- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2033
2034- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2035 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2036
2037- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2038 deleted at process exit time.
2039
2040- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2041 in backslash.
2042
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002043Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002044----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002045
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002046- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2047 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2048 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2049
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002050
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002051What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002052===========================
2053
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002054*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2055
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002056Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002057--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002058
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002059- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2060 been extensively updated. See
2061
2062 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2063
2064 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2065
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002066- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2067 deleted!
2068
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002069- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2070 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2071 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2072 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2073 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2074
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002075- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2076
2077 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2078 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2079
2080 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2081 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2082 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2083 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2084 supported anyway.
2085
2086 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2087 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2088
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002089- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2090 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2091 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2092 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2093 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002094
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002095- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2096 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2097 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2098
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002099Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002100-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002101
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002102- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2103 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2104 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2105 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2106 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2107 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002108 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2109 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2110 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2111 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002112
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002113- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2114 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2115 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2116
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002117Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002118-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002119
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002120- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2121
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002122Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002123-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002124
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002125- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2126 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2127 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2128 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2129 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2130 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2131
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002132- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2133
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002134- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2135
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002136- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2137
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002138- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2139 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2140 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2141
2142- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2143
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002144Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002145-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002146
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002147- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2148 off a search on Google.
2149
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002150Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002151-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002152
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002153- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2154 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2155 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2156 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2157 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2158 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2159 other platforms should do likewise.
2160
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002161- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2162 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2163 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2164
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002165C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002166-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002167
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002168- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2169 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2170 producing key-value pairs.
2171
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002172- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002173 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002174 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2175 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2176 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2177 previously went unchallenged.
2178
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002179New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002180-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002181
2182Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002183-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002184
2185Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002186-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002187
2188Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002189----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002190
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002191- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2192 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002193
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002194- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2195 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2196 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2197 home.
2198
2199
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002200What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002201===========================
2202
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002203*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2204
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002205Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002206--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002207
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002208- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2209 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002210
2211 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002212 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002213
2214 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2215 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002216 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002217 This needs to be documented.
2218
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002219- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2220 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2221
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002222- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2223 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2224 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2225
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002226- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2227 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2228
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002229- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2230 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2231 class forbids it).
2232
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002233- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2234 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2235 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2236
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002237- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2238
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002239Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002240-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002241
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002242- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2243 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002244 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002245
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002246- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2247 (like 1 + '').
2248
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002249Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002250-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002251
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002252- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2253 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2254 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2255 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002256 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002257 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2258
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002259- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2260 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2261 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2262 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2263
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002264- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2265 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002266 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2267 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2268 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002269
2270- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2271 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002272
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002273- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2274 bytes on its input.
2275
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002276Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002278
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002279- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002280 convenience function.
2281
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002282- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2283 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2284 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002285 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2286 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2287 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2288 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2289 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2290 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002291
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002292- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2293 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2294 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2295 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2296
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002297- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2298 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2299 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2300
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002301- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2302 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2303 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2304 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2305
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002306- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2307 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002308 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002309 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2310 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2311 new -l and -e options.
2312
2313- statcache is now deprecated.
2314
2315- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2316 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002317 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002318 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2319 time properly taken into account.
2320
2321- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2322 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2323 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2324 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2325
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002326Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002327-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002328
2329Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002330-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002331
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002332- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2333 is built with libdb3 if available.
2334
2335- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2336
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002337C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002338-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002339
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002340- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2341 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2342 PySequence_Size().
2343
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002344- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2345
2346- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2347 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2348 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2349
2350- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2351 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2352
2353- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2354 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2355
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002356New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002357-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002358
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002359- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2360 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2361
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002362- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2363 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2364
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002365- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2366
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002367Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002368-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002369
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002370- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2371 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2372
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002373Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002374-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002375
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002376Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002377----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002378
2379- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2380 removed completely in the next release.
2381
2382- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2383 OSX.
2384
2385- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2386 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2387
2388- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2389
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002390
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002391What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002392===========================
2393
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002394*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2395
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002396Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002397--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002398
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002399- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002400 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002401 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002402 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2403 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002404 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2405 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002406 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2407 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002408
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002409- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2410 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2411
2412- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2413 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2414
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002415Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002416-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002417
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002418- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2419 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2420 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2421 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2422 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2423 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2424 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2425 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2426
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002427- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2428 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2429 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2430 example).
2431
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002432- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002433 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002434 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002435 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002436
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002437- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2438 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2439 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002440 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002441
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002442- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2443 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2444 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2445 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2446 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2447 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2448
2449 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2450
2451 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2452
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002453Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002454-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002455
2456- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2457
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002458- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2459
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002460- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2461 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002462
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002463- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2464 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2465 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2466 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2467 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2468 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002469 attributes.
2470
2471- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2472 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2473 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002474
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002475- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2476 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2477 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002478
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002479- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2480 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2481 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002482 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2483 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2484
2485- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2486 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002487
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002488Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002489-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002490
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002491- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2492 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2493
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002494- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2495 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2496 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2497 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2498
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002499- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2500 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2501 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2502 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2503
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002504 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2505 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2506 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2507 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2508 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2509 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2510 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2511 without losing information).
2512
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002513- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002514 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2515 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2516 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2517 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2518 module).
2519
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002520 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002521 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2522 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2523 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2524 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002525
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002526- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002527 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2528 encoding.
2529
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002530- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2531 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2532
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002533- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002534 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2535
2536- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2537 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2538 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2539 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2540
2541- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2542
2543- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2544 ON, and OFF.
2545
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002546- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2547 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2548
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002549Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002550-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002551
2552- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2553 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2554 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002555
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002556- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2557 been added: -X and -E.
2558
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002559Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002560-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002561
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002562- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2563 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2564
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002565C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002566-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002567
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002568- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2569 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2570 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2571 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2572 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2573
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002574- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2575 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2576 as long) arguments.
2577
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002578- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2579 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2580 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2581 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2582 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2583 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2584
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002585- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2586 input.
2587
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002588New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002589-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002590
2591Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002592-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002593
2594Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002595-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002596
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002597- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2598 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2599 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2600
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002601- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2602 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2603 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002604 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002605
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2607 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2608 import signal
2609 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002610
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002611 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002612 while 1:
2613 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002615 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2616 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2617 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2618 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002619
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002620
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002621What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2622===========================
2623
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002624*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2625
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002626Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002627--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002628
2629- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2630 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2631 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2632
2633- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2634 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2635 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2636 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2637 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2638 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2639 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002640
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002641- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002642 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002643 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2644 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2645 associate a docstring with a property.
2646
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002647- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2648 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2649 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2650 other built-in object types.
2651
2652- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2653 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2654 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2655 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2656 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2657
2658- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2659 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2660
2661- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2662 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002663 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002664 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2665 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2666 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2667 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2668 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2669
2670- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2671 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2672 class.
2673
2674- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2675 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2676 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2677 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2678
2679- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2680 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2681 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2682 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2683
2684- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2685 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2686
2687- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2688 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2689 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2690 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2691 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002692 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002693 with the same value as s.
2694
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002695- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2696
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002697Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002698----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002699
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002700- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2701
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002702- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2703 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2704 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2705 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2706 objects.
2707
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002708- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2709 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002710 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2711 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2712
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002713- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2714 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2715 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2716
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002717Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002718-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002719
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002720- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2721 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2722 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2723 by the instances.
2724
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002725- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2726 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2727 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2728
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002729- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2730 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2731 before the entire comparison is complete.
2732
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002733- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2734 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2735 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2736
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002737- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2738 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2739 getwriter().
2740
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002741- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2742 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2743
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002744- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002745 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2746 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2747
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002748- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2749 iterable object.
2750
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002751- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2752 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002753
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002754- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2755 authentication.
2756
2757- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2758 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002759
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002760- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002761 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2762 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2763 a sample driver.)
2764
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002765Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002766-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002767
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002768- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2769 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2770 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2771 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2772 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2773 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2774 kernel has large file support.
2775
2776- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2777 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2778 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2779 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2780 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2781
2782- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2783 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2784 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2785
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002786C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002788
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002789- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2790 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2791
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002792New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002793-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002794
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002795- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2796 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2797
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002798Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002799-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002800
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002801- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2802 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2803 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2804 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2805 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2806
2807- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2808 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2809 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2810 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2811
2812- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2813 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2814
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002815Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002817
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002818- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002819 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2820 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002821
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002822
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002823What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2824===========================
2825
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2827
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002828Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002830
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002831- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2832 big to represent as a C double.
2833
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002834- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2835 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2836 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2837 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2838 restriction).
2839
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002840- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2841 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2842 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2843 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2844 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2845
2846 >>> dir([])
2847 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2848 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2849 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2850 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2851 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2852 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2853 'reverse', 'sort']
2854
2855 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2856
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002857- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002858 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2859 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2860 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2861 OverflowError exception.
2862
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002863- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002864 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002865 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2866 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2867 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2868 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2869 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002870 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002871 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2872 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2873
2874 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2875 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2876 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2877 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002878
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002879- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002880 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2881 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2882 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2883 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2884 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2885 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2886 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2887 once it is created.
2888
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002889- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2890 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2891 (key, value) pairs.
2892
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002893- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002894 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2895 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2896
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002897- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2898 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2899 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2900 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2901 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002902
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002903- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002904 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2905 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2906
2907 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2908
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002909- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002910 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2911
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002912Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002913-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002914
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002915- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002916 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2917 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002918
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002919- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2920 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2921 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2922 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2923 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2924 in this area anymore).
2925
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002926- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2927 threading.Timer.
2928
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002929- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2930 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2931
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002932- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002933 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2934
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002935- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002936 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2937 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2938 converted to Python longs.
2939
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002940- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002941 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2942
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002943- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2944 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2945 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2946
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002947Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002949
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002950- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2951 division operators as per PEP 238.
2952
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002953Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002954-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002955
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002956- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2957 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2958 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2959 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2960
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002961C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002962-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002963
2964- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002965
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002966- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2967 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002968 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002969
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2971 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002972 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002974
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002975- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002976 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2977 module:
2978
2979 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002980
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002981 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2982 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002983
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002984 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2985 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002986
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002987 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2988
2989 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2990
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002991- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002992 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2993 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2994 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002995
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002996New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002997-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002998
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002999- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3000 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3001 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3002 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3003 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003004
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003005Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003006-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003007
3008Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003009-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003010
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003011- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3012 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3013 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3014 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003015 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3016 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3017 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3018 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3019 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003020
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003021- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003022 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3023
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003024
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003025What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3026===========================
3027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3029
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003030Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003031-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003032
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003033- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3034 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3035
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003036- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3037 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3038 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003039
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003040- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3041 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3042 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3043 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003044
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003045- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3046
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003047- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003048
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003049Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003050-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003051
3052- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003053 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003054 the module docstring for details.
3055
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003056Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003057-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003058
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003059- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003060 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3061 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3062 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003063
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003064- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3065 Nick Mathewson.
3066
3067Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003069
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003070- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3071 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3072 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3073 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3074 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3075 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3076 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3077 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3078
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003079- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3080 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3081 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3082 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3083
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003084- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3085 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3086 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3087 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3088 come a long way).
3089
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003090- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3091 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3092 write filters for these warnings).
3093
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003094- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3095 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3096 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3097 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3098 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3099
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003100- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3101 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3102 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3103 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3104 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3105 older distribution.
3106
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003107Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003108-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003109
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003110- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3111 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003112 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003113
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003114- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3115 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3116 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3117
3118- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3119
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003120- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3121
3122- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3123
3124- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3125
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003127
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003128- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3129
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003130New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003132
3133C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003134-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003135
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003136- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3137 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3138 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3139 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3140 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3141 against buffer overruns.
3142
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003143- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003144 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3145 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003146 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3147 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3148 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3149
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003150- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3151 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3152 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3153 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3154 deprecated.
3155
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003156Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003157-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003158
3159- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3160 relevant is found.
3161
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003162
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003163What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003164===========================
3165
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003166*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3167
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003168Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003169----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003170
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003171- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3172 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3173 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3174 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3175 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3176 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3177 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3178 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003179 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003180 repaired.
3181
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003182- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003183 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003184 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3185 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3186 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3187 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3188 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3189 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3190 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3191 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3192
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003193- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3194 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3195 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3196 leading BMO character).
3197
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003198- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3199 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3200 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3201
3202 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3203 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3204 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003205
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003206 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3207 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3208 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3209 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3210 for various simple to use conversions.
3211
3212 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3213 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3214
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3216 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3217 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3218 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3219 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3220 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3221 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3222 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3223 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3224 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3225 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3226 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3227 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3228 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3229 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003230
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003231- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3232 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3233 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003234 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003235 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003236
3237 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003238 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3239 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3240 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3241 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3242 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003243 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3244 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003245
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003246 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3247 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3248 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003249 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003250
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003251- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3252 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3253 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3254 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3255 floating arithmetic,
3256
3257 x = 9007199254740992.0
3258 print long(x)
3259
3260 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3261 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3262 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3263 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3264 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3265 functions are of good quality).
3266
3267 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3268 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3269 algorithms to break.
3270
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003271- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3272 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3273 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3274 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3275 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3276 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3277 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3278 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3279 order.
3280
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003281- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3282 operation along the most common code paths.
3283
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003284- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3285 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3286
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003287- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3288 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3289 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3290 {}.update(UserDict())
3291
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003292- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3293 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3294 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3295 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3296 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3297 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3298 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3299 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3300
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003301- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003302 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003304 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003305 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3306 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003307 join() method of strings
3308 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003309 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3310 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003312 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003313
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003314- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3315 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3316
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003317- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3318 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3319
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003320- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3321 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3322 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3323 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3324
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003325- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3326 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003327 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003328 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3329 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003330
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003331- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3332
3333
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003334Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003335-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003336
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003337- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003338 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003339 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3340 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3341
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003342- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3343 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3344
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003345- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3346 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3347 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3348 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3349
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003350- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3351 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3352 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3353
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003354- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3355
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003356- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3357
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003358- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3359 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3360 that are still imported into string.py).
3361
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003362- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3363
3364- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3365 Now it does.
3366
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003367- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3368
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003369- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3370 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3371 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3372 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3373 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003374 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3375 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003376
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003377- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3378 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3379 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3380 'help(object)'.
3381
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003382Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003384
3385- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003386 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003387 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3388 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3389
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003390- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003391 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3392 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003393
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003394C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003396
3397- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3398 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399
3400----
3401
3402**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**