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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +000015- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
16 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
17
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000018- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
19 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
20 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
21 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
22 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
23 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
24 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
25 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +000026 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
27 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
28 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
29 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
30 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000031
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000032- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
33 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
34 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
35 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
36 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
37
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000038- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
39
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000040- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
41 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
42
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000043- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
44 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
45 modified the list.
46
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000047- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
48 functions is now writable.
49
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000050- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
51 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
52 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
53 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
54
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000055- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
56 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
57 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
58 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
59 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000060
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000061- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
62 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
63
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000064Extension modules
65-----------------
66
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000067- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
68
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +000069- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
70 data.
71
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000072- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
73 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
74 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
75 supposed to have been truncated away.
76
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000077- Added socket.socketpair().
78
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +000079- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
80 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
81
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +000082- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
83 versions of Python, have now been removed.
84
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000085Library
86-------
87
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +000088- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
89 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
90
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +000091- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
92 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
93
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +000094- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
95 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
96
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000097- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
98
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +000099- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
100 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000101
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000102- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
103 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
104
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000105- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
106
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000107- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
108
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000109- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
110
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000111- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
112 Percivall.
113
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000114- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
115 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
116
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000117- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
118 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
119 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000120 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000121
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000122- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
123 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
124 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
125 and exponent.
126
127- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
128
129- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
130 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
131 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
132
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000133- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
134 to the readline module.
135
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000136- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000137 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
138 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000139
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000140- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
141 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
142 contains symlinks.
143
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000144- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
145 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
146
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000147- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
148 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
149 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
150
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000151- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
152 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
153 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
154 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
155 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
156 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
157 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
158 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
159 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
160 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
161 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
162 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
163 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
164
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000165- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
166
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000167Tools/Demos
168-----------
169
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000170- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
171 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
172
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000173- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
174
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000175Build
176-----
177
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000178- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
179 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
180 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
181 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
182 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
183 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
184 plans to do so.
185
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000186- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
187 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
188
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000189- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
190 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
191
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000192- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
193 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
194
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000195- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
196 GNU/k*BSD systems.
197
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000198- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
199 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
200
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000201C API
202-----
203
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000204..
205
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000206Documentation
207-------------
208
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000209- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
210 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
211
212- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
213 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
214 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000215
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000216New platforms
217-------------
218
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000219- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
220
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000221Tests
222-----
223
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000224..
225
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000226Windows
227-------
228
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000229- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
230 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
231 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
232 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
233 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
234 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
235 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
236 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
237 the problem.
238
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000239Mac
240---
241
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000242..
243
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000244
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000245What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
246=================================
247
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000248*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000249
250Core and builtins
251-----------------
252
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000253- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
254 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
255 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
256 sensitive code.
257
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000258- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000259 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
260
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000261 @staticmethod
262 def foo(bar):
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000263
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000264 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000265
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000266- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
267 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
268 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
269 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
270 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
271 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
272 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
273 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
274 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
275 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
276 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
277
278 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
279 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
280 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
281 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
282 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
283 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
284 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
285
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000286- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
287 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
288
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000289- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000290 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000291
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000292- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000293 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000294 which was missing for no apparent reason.
295
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000296- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000297 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
298 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
299
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000300- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
301 types that support garbage collection.
302
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000303- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
304
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000305- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
306 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
307 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
308 Jython.
309
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000310- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
311
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000312- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
313 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
314
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000315- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
316 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
317 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000318
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000319- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
320 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
321 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
322
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000323Extension modules
324-----------------
325
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000326- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
327
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000328Library
329-------
330
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000331- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
332 TIS-620
333
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000334- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
335 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
336 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
337 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
338 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
339 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
340 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
341 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
342 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
343 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
344
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000345- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
346
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000347- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
348 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
349 same as when the argument is omitted).
350 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
351
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000352- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
353
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000354- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
355 schemes are offered.
356
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000357- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
358
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000359- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
360 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
361 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
362
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000363- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
364
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000365- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
366 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
367
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000368- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
369 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
370 when dummy_threading is being used.
371
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000372- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
373 from a tarfile.
374
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000375- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000376 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000377
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000378- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
379 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
380 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
381 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
382
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000383- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
384 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
385
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000386- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
387 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
388 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
389 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
390 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
391 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
392 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
393 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
394 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
395 by some other method in progress).
396
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000397- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
398 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
399 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000400
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000401- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
402
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000403- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
404 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
405 AM Kuchling.
406
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000407- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
408 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
409 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
410
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000411- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
412 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
413 instead of unsigned.
414
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000415- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000416 no longer part of the public API.
417
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000418- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
419 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
420 string methods of the same name).
421
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000422- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000423 SF patch 945642.
424
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000425- doctest unittest integration improvements:
426
427 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
428
429 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
430 DocTestSuites.
431
432- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
433 that provide thread-local data.
434
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000435- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
436 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
437
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000438- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
439
440- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
441 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
442 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
443
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000444- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
445
446 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
447 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
448 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000449
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000450 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
451 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
452 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
453 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
454
455 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
456 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
457
458 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
459 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
460 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
461 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
462
463 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
464 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
465 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
466 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
467 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
468
469 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
470 wrapping help output.
471
472 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
473 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
474 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000475
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000476C API
477-----
478
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000479- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
480 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
481 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
482 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
483 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
484 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
485 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
486 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
487 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
488 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
489 its visible semantics have not changed.
490
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000491- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
492 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
493
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000494Documentation
495-------------
496
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000497- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000498
499 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000500 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000501
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000502 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000503
504 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
505
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000506- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000507
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000508Tests
509-----
510
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000511- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000512 platforms that use the Makefile.
513
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000514- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
515 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
516 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
517
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000518
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000519What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
520=================================
521
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000522*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000523
524Core and builtins
525-----------------
526
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000527- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
528 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
529 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
530 objects now (one object instead of three).
531
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000532- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
533 Windows DLLs.
534
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000535- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
536 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000537
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000538- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
539 a new .pyc magic.
540
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000541- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
542 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
543 be there.
544
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000545- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
546 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
547 the LC_NUMERIC category.
548
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000549- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
550 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
551 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
552
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000553- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
554
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000555- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
556 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
557 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000558
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000559- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
560 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
561
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000562- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
563
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000564- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000565 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000566
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000567- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
568
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000569- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
570
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000571- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
572 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
573
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000574- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
575 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
576 Fixes bug #858016 .
577
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000578- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
579 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
580 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
581
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000582- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
583 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
584 improves their performance (about 35%).
585
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000586- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
587 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
588 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
589
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000590- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
591 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
592 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
593 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
594
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000595- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
596 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
597 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
598 length is not known).
599
600- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
601 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000602 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
603 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000604 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
605
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000606- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
607 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
608
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000609- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
610 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
611 keyword arguments.
612
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000613- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
614 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
615 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
616
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000617- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
618 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
619 cases.
620
621- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
622 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
623 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
624 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
625 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
626 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
627 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
628 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
629 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
630 a release build.
631
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000632- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
633 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
634
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000635- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000636 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000637
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000638- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
639 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
640 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
641 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
642 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
643 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
644 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
645 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
646 destroyed.
647
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000648- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
649 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
650 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
651 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
652 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
653 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
654 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
655 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
656
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000657- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
658 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
659 character other than a space.
660
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000661- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
662 by the function object or by the method object, the function
663 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
664 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
665 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
666 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
667 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
668 attributes with the same name.
669
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000670- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
671 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
672 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
673 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
674 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
675 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
676 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
677 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
678 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
679 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
680 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
681 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
682 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
683 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000684
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000685- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
686 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
687 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
688 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
689 This has been repaired.
690
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000691- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
692
693- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
694
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000695- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
696 over a sequence.
697
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000698- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000699 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000700
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000701- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
702
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000703- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
704 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
705 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
706 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
707 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
708 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
709 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
710 records with equal keys is unchanged).
711
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000712- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
713 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
714 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
715
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000716- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
717 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
718 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
719 freelist.
720
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000721- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
722 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
723
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000724- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
725 number.
726
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000727- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
728 a TypeError exception.
729
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000730- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
731 820195.
732
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000733- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
734 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
735 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
736
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000737- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000738 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
739 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000740
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000741- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
742 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
743 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
744
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000745- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
746 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000747 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000748
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000749- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000750 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
751 the first call.
752
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000753
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000754Extension modules
755-----------------
756
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000757- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
758 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
759
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000760- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
761 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
762 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
763 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
764 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
765 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
766 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000767
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000768- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
769
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000770- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
771
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000772- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
773 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
774
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000775- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
776 fewer false positives.
777
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000778- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
779 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
780
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000781- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000782 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
783
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000784- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000785 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000786 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000787 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
788 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000789
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000790- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
791 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
792 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
793 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
794
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000795- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
796 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
797 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
798 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
799 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
800 #897625.
801
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000802- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
803 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
804
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000805- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
806 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
807 and pops on either side of the deque.
808
809- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
810 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
811
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000812- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
813 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
814 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
815 other functions that expect a function argument.
816
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000817- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
818
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000819- os.getsid was added.
820
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000821- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
822 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
823 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
824
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000825- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
826
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000827- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
828
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000829- readline.clear_history was added.
830
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000831- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
832
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000833- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
834
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000835- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
836
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000837- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
838
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000839- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
840
841- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
842
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000843- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
844
845- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
846
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000847- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
848 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
849 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
850
851- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
852 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
853 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
854 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
855 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
856 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
857 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
858
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000859- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
860 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
861 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
862 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000863
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000864- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000865 iterators from a single iterable.
866
867- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
868 of raising a TypeError exception.
869
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000870- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
871 as parameter.
872
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000873Library
874-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000875
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000876- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
877 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
878 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000879
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000880- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
881 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
882 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000883
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000884- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000885
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000886- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
887 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000888
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000889- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
890 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
891
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000892- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
893
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000894- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000895 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000896
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000897- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000898 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000899
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000900- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
901
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000902- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
903 on cygwin and mingw32.
904
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000905- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
906
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000907- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
908 module.
909
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000910- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
911 installation scheme for all platforms.
912
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000913- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000914 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000915
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000916- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
917 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
918 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
919
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000920- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
921 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
922 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
923
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000924- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
925
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000926- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
927
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000928- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
929 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
930
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000931- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
932 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
933 type pattern with the same value exists.
934
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000935- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
936 when run from the command prompt).
937
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000938- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
939 not taken into consideration when caching value.
940
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000941- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
942 default sort).
943
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000944- Added global runctx function to profile module
945
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000946- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
947
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000948- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
949
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000950- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
951
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000952- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000953 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
954 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
955 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
956 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
957 accordingly.
958
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000959- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
960 decoding standards.
961
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000962- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
963 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
964 called for all requests.
965
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000966- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
967 they are passed to the compiler.
968
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000969- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
970 indent, width and depth.
971
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000972- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
973 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
974
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000975- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
976 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
977
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000978- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
979
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000980- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
981
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000982- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
983
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000984- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
985 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
986
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000987- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000988 for better performance.
989
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000990- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000991
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000992- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
993 a string).
994
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000995- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
996
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000997- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
998
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000999- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1000
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001001- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1002
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001003- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1004 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1005 list of fieldnames.
1006
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001007- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1008 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1009
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001010- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1011
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001012- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1013 empty lists.
1014
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001015- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1016 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1017 and shelves.
1018
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001019- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1020 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1021
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001022- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001023 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1024 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001025
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001026- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1027 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001028 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001029
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001030- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001031 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1032 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1033
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001034- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1035 and removed in Py2.4.
1036
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001037- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1038
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001039- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1040
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001041Tools/Demos
1042-----------
1043
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001044- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1045 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1046
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001047- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1048
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001049- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1050 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1051 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1052 destination in situations where both files are given.
1053
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001054- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1055 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1056 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1057 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1058
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001059- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1060
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001061- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1062 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1063 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1064 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1065 now.
1066
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001067- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1068 in effect
1069
1070- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1071 C-c C-h
1072
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001073- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1074 -d option was given.
1075
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001076Build
1077-----
1078
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001079- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1080 build under OS X.
1081
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001082- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1083 --enable-profiling.
1084
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001085- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1086 is configured --with-tsc.
1087
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001088- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1089 on AMD64.
1090
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001091- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1092 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1093
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001094- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1095 removed.
1096
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001097- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1098 supported (see PEP 11).
1099
1100- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1101
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001102- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1103
1104- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1105 (see PEP 11).
1106
1107- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1108 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1109
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001110C API
1111-----
1112
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001113- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1114 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1115 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1116
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001117- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1118 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1119 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1120 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1121
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001122- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1123 generator objects.
1124
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001125- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1126 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001127 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1128 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001129
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001130- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1131 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1132
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001133- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1134 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1135 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1136 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1137 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1138
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001139- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1140 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1141 about 10% faster.
1142
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001143- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1144 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1145
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001146- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1147 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1148 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1149 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1150
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001151Windows
1152-------
1153
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001154- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1155 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1156 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1157 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1158
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001159- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1160 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1161 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1162
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001163
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001164What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1165===============================
1166
1167*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1168
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001169IDLE
1170----
1171
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001172- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1173 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1174 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1175 context-menu actions.
1176
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001177- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1178 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1179 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1180 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1181 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1182 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1183 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1184 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1185 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1186
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001187
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001188What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1189=============================================
1190
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001191*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001192
1193Core and builtins
1194-----------------
1195
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001196- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001197 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001198 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1199
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001200Extension modules
1201-----------------
1202
1203- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1204 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1205 than once. This has been fixed.
1206
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001207- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1208 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1209 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1210 call.
1211
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001212- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1213
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001214Library
1215-------
1216
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001217- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1218 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1219
1220- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1221 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1222 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1223 restored.
1224
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001225IDLE
1226----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001227
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001228- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001229
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001230Build
1231-----
1232
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001233- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1234 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1235
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001236C API
1237-----
1238
1239Windows
1240-------
1241
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001242- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1243 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1244
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001245- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1246
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001247Mac
1248---
1249
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001250- Various fixes to pimp.
1251
1252- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1253
1254- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1255 more problems than it solves.
1256
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001257
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001258What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1259=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001260
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001261*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1262
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001263Core and builtins
1264-----------------
1265
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001266- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1267 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1268
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001269- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1270 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001271 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001272
1273- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1274 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1275 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001276 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001277
1278- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1279 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001280
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001281- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1282 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1283 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1284
1285- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001286 770247.
1287
1288- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001289
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001290Extension modules
1291-----------------
1292
1293- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1294 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1295
1296- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1297
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001298- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1299
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001300- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1301 contained within the _strptime module.
1302
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001303- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1304 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1305
1306- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001307 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1308
1309- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1310 the find_class attribute, if present.
1311
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001312- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001313
1314 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1315 (SF bug 763298).
1316
1317 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001318 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1319 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1320 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001321
1322 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1323
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001324Library
1325-------
1326
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001327- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1328
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001329- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1330 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1331 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1332 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1333 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1334 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1335 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1336 or Tester().
1337
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001338- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1339 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1340 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1341 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1342 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1343 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1344 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1345 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1346 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001347
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001348 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001349
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001350- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1351 weren't before was an oversight.
1352
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001353- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1354 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1355
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001356- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1357 when there are no lines.
1358
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001359- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1360 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1361
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001362- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1363 to child processes.
1364
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001365- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1366
1367- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1368
1369- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1370 xmlrpclib.
1371
1372- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1373 responses.
1374
1375- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1376 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1377
1378- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1379 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1380 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1381
1382- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1383 used as patterns.
1384
1385- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1386 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1387 than Tk 8.3.
1388
1389- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1390
1391- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001392
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001393Tools/Demos
1394-----------
1395
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001396- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1397
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001398- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1399
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001400- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001401
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001402Build
1403-----
1404
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001405- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1406
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001407- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1408
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001409- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1410 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001411
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001412- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1413 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1414 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001415
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001416C API
1417-----
1418
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001419- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1420 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1421
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001422Windows
1423-------
1424
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001425- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1426 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1427 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1428 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1429 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1430 Python exception ::
1431
1432 thread.error: can't start new thread
1433
1434 is raised now.
1435
1436- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1437 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1438 instead of from DLL teardown.
1439
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001440Mac
1441---
1442
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001443- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001444 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001445 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1446 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1447 the executable in the bundle.
1448
1449- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001450
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001451- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1452
1453- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1454 on Panther.
1455
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001456What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1457================================
1458
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001459*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001460
1461Core and builtins
1462-----------------
1463
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001464- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1465 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1466 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1467 with the -i option.
1468
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001469- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1470 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1471
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001472- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1473 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1474
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001475- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1476 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1477 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1478 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1479 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1480 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1481 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1482 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1483 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1484 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1485 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1486 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1487 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001488
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001489- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1490 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1491 embedded in a lambda expression.
1492
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001493- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1494 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1495 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1496 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1497 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1498
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001499- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1500 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1501 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1502
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001503- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1504 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1505
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001506- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1507 It's writable again.
1508
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001509- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1510 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1511 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001512 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001513
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001514- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1515 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1516 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1517
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001518Extension modules
1519-----------------
1520
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001521- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1522 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1523
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001524- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1525 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1526 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1527 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1528
1529- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1530 collection.
1531
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001532- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1533 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1534 unique within a single program run.
1535
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001536- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1537 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1538
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001539- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1540 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1541
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001542- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1543 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001544
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001545- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1546
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001547- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1548 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1549
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001550- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1551 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1552 for many BSD-derived systems.
1553
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001554
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001555Library
1556-------
1557
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001558- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1559 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1560 primary ones:
1561
1562 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1563 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1564 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1565
1566 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1567 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1568 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1569 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1570 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1571 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1572
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001573- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1574 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1575 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1576 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1577 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1578 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1579 argument.
1580
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001581- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1582 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1583 in the archive.
1584
1585- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1586 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1587
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001588- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1589 569574).
1590
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001591- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1592 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1593 no more.
1594
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001595- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1596 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1597 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1598 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1599 code coverage.
1600
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001601- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1602 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1603 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001604 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1605 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001606
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001607- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1608 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1609 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001610 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001611
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001612- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1613
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001614- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1615 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1616 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1617 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1618
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001619- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1620 handling.
1621
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001622- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1623 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1624
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001625- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1626 in socket.py.
1627
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001628- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1629
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001630- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1631 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1632 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1633 opener with proxy support.
1634
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001635- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1636
1637- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1638
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001639Tools/Demos
1640-----------
1641
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001642- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1643
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001644- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1645
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001646- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1647 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001648
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001649- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1650 files.
1651
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001652Build
1653-----
1654
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001655- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001656 different root directory.
1657
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001658C API
1659-----
1660
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001661- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1662 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1663 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1664 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1665 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1666 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1667 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1668 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1669 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1670 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1671
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001672- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1673 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1674 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1675 from Python.
1676
1677
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001678New platforms
1679-------------
1680
1681None this time.
1682
1683Tests
1684-----
1685
1686- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1687 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1688
1689Windows
1690-------
1691
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001692- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1693
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001694- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1695 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1696 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1697 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1698 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1699 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1700 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1701 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1702 that's what it's for.
1703
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001704Mac
1705---
1706
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001707- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1708 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1709 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1710 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001711- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1712 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1713- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001714
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001715SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1716------------------------------------
1717
1718430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1719598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1720622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1721661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1722683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1723697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1724713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1725724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1726727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1727729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1728730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1729731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1730732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1731733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1732735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1733740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1734744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1735745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1736747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1737749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1738751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1739753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1740755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1741757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1742760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1743
1744
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001745What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1746================================
1747
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001748*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001749
1750Core and builtins
1751-----------------
1752
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001753- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1754 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1755
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001756- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1757 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1758 and cannot be strings).
1759
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001760- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1761 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1762 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1763 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1764
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001765- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1766 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1767 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1768 Python itself.
1769
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001770- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1771 the referenced object, if it has one.
1772
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001773- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1774 the thread started at
1775 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1776
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001777- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1778 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1779 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1780 placed on a list index.
1781
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001782- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1783 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1784 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1785 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1786
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001787- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1788 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1789 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1790 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1791 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1792 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1793 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1794
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001795- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1796 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1797 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1798 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1799 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1800
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001801- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1802 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001803
1804- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1805 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1806 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1807 #693195.)
1808
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001809- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1810 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001811
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001812- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001813 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001814 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1815 interpreter executions, would fail.
1816
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001817- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001818 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001819 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001820
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001821Extension modules
1822-----------------
1823
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001824- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1825 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1826 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1827 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1828
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001829- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1830 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1831
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001832- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1833 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1834 and Greg Chapman.)
1835
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001836- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1837 recursively.
1838
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001839- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001840 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1841 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1842 leaks.
1843
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001844- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1845
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001846- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1847 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1848 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1849 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1850 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1851 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1852 #705836.
1853
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001854- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001855 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1856
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001857- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1858 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1859 See SF bug #692416.
1860
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001861- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1862 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1863
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001864- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1865 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1866 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001867
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001868- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001869 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1870 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1871
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001872- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1873 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1874 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1875 timeouts to work properly.
1876
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001877Library
1878-------
1879
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001880- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1881 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1882 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1883 future release.
1884
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001885- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1886 for querying platform dependent features.
1887
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001888- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001889
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001890- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1891 pickle protocol versions.
1892
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001893- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1894 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1895 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1896
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001897- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1898
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001899- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1900 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1901 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1902 modules.
1903
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001904- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1905 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1906 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1907
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001908- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1909 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1910
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001911- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1912 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1913 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1914
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001915- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001916 MS Office extensions.
1917
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001918- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1919 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1920
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001921- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1922 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1923
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001924- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1925 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1926 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1927 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1928 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1929 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1930
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001931- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1932 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1933 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001934
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001935- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1936 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1937 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1938
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001939- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1940
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001941- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1942 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1943 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1944
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001945Tools/Demos
1946-----------
1947
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001948- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1949 See the module docstring for details.
1950
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001951Build
1952-----
1953
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001954- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1955 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001956
1957C API
1958-----
1959
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001960- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1961
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001962- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1963 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1964 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1965
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001966- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1967 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001968
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001969 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1970 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1971 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001972
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001973- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001974 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1975
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001976- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1977 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1978 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001979
1980New platforms
1981-------------
1982
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001983None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001984
1985Tests
1986-----
1987
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001988- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1989 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001990
1991Windows
1992-------
1993
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001994- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1995 function.
1996
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001997- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1998 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001999
2000Mac
2001---
2002
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002003- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2004 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002005
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002006- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2007 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002008
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002009- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2010 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2011 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002012
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002013- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002014 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2015 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002016
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002017- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2018 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002019
2020
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002021What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2022=================================
2023
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002024*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002025
2026Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002027-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002028
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002029- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2030 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2031 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2032
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002033- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2034 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2035 (SF patch #664376.)
2036
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002037- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2038 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2039 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2040 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2041 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2042 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002043 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002044
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002045- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2046 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2047 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2048 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002049 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002050
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002051- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2052 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2053 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2054 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2055 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2056 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2057 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2058 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2059 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2060 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2061 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2062
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002063- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2064 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2065 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2066 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2067 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2068 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2069
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002070- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2071 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2072
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002073- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2074 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2075 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2076 case.)
2077
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002078- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2079 passed as unicode strings.
2080
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002081- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2082 See SF bug #683467.
2083
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002084- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2085 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2086
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002087- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2088
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002089- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2090
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002091- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2092 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2093 arguments.
2094
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002095- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2096 See SF bug #667147.
2097
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002098- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002099 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002100 See SF bug #676155.
2101
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002102- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002103 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002104 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2105 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2106 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2107 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2108 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2109 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002110
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002111Extension modules
2112-----------------
2113
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002114- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2115 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2116 tp_as_number pointer.
2117
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002118- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2119 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2120 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2121 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2122 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2123
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002124- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2125
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002126- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2127
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002128- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002129 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002130 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2131 patch #678531.)
2132
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002133- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2134 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2135
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002136- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2137 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2138
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002139- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2140
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002141- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2142 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2143 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2144
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002145- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2146
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002147- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2148 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2149
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002150- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002151
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002152- datetime changes:
2153
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002154 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2155
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002156 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2157 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2158 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2159 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2160 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2161 now.
2162
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002163 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002164 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2165 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002166
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002167 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002168 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002169 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2170 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2171 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2172 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002173
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002174 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2175 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2176 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002177 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2178
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002179 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2180 by a later example coded by Guido.
2181
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002182 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002183 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2184 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2185 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002186 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2187 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2188
2189 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2190 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2191 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2192 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2193 tzinfo subclass instance.
2194
2195 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2196 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2197 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2198 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2199 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2200 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2201 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2202 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002203
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002204 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2205 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2206 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2207 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2208 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002209 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2210
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002211 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002212
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002213 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2214 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2215 as a naive datetime object.
2216
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002217 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2218 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2219 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2220
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002221 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2222 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2223 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2224 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2225 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2226 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2227 comparison.
2228
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002229 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2230 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2231 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2232 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002233 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002234
2235 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002236
2237 and ::
2238
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002239 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2240
2241 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2242 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2243 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2244 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2245
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002246 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2247 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2248 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2249 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2250 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2251
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002252 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2253 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002254 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2255 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002257Library
2258-------
2259
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002260- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2261 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2262
2263- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2264 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2265 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2266 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2267 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2268 See PEP 307 for details.
2269
2270- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2271 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2272
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002273- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2274 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002275 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002276 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2277 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002278 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002279
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002280- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2281 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2282
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002283- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2284 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2285 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2286
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002287- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2288
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002289- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2290 exception.
2291
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002292- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2293 class.
2294
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002295- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2296 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2297 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2298
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002299- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2300 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2301
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002302- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002303 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2304 See SF bug #659228.
2305
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002306- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2307 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2308 See SF patch #651082.
2309
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002310- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002311
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002312- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2313 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2314
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002315- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002316 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002317
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002318- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2319 DOS paths from other platforms.
2320
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002321Tools/Demos
2322-----------
2323
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002324- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2325 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2326 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2327 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2328 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2329 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2330 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2331 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2332 example:
2333
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002334 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2335 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002336
2337 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2338
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002339
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002340Build
2341-----
2342
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002343- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2344 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2345 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002346 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2347
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002348 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2349
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002350- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2351 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2352 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2353 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2354 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2355 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2356 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2357 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2358 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2359
2360- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2361 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2362 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2363 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2364
2365- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2366 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2367
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002368C API
2369-----
2370
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002371- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2372 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002373
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002374- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2375 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2376 tp_as_number pointer.
2377
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002378- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2379 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2380 (SF #681367)
2381
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002382- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2383 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2384 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2385 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002386
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002387Tests
2388-----
2389
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002390- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002391 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2392 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2393 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2394 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2395 pydoc.)
2396
2397- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2398
2399- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002400
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002401Windows
2402-------
2403
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002404- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2405 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2406 time).
2407
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002408- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2409 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2410
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002411- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2412 release without strong cryptography.
2413
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002414- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002415 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002416
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002417- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2418 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2419
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002420Mac
2421---
2422
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002423- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2424 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002425
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002426- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2427 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2428 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002429
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002430- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2431 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002432
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002433- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2434 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2435 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2436 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002437
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002438- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002439 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2440 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2441 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002442
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002443
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002444What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002445=================================
2446
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002447*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002448
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002449Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002450--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002451
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002452- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2453
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002454- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2455 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002456 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002457 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002458 a different meaning than before.
2459
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002460- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002461 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002462 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002463
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002464- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002465 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002466 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002467
2468- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2469 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2470 and deallocation.
2471
2472- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2473 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2474
2475- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2476 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2477 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2478 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2479 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2480
2481- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2482 now detected by the garbage collector.
2483
2484- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2485 [SF bug 519621]
2486
2487- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2488 identifier.
2489
2490- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2491 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2492 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2493 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2494 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2495 [SF bug 563060]
2496
2497- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2498 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2499 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2500 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2501 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2502
2503- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2504 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2505 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2506
2507- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2508
2509- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2510 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2511 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2512 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2513 state of the slots would be lost.)
2514
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002515Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002516-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002517
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002518- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002519 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2520 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2521 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2522 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002523 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2524 Jython 2.1.
2525
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002526- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002527 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002528 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2529 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2530 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2531 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2532 these, see PEP 302.
2533
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002534- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2535 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2536 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2537
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002538- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2539 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2540 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2541
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002542- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2543 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2544 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2545
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002546- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2547 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2548 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2549 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2550 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2551 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2552 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2553 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2554 releases or implementations.
2555
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002556- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002557 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2558 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002559
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002560- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2561 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2562
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002563- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2564 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2565 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2566
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002567- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2568 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2569
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002570- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2571 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002572 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2573 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002574
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002575- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2576 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2577 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2578 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2579 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2580
2581 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2582 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2583 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2584 pattern.
2585
2586 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2587 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2588 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2589 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2590
2591 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2592 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2593 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2594 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2595 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2596 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2597
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002598- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2599 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2600 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2601 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2602 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2603 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2604 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2605 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002606
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002607- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2608 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2609 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2610 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2611 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002612 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2613 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2614 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2615 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2616 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2617 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2618 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002619
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002620- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2621 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2622
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002623- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2624 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2625 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2626 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2627 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2628 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2629 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2630 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2631 to Zack Weinberg!
2632
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002633- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2634 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2635 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2636 type. This has been fixed now.
2637
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002638- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2639 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2640 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2641
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002642- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2643 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2644 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2645 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2646 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2647 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2648 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2649 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002650 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002651
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002652- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2653 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2654 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002655
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002656- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2657 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2658 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2659 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2660 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2661 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2662 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2663 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002664 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002665 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2666 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2667
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002668- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2669 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2670 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2671 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2672 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2673 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2674 this.)
2675
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002676- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2677 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002678 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002679 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002680 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2681 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002682 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2683 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002684
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002685- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2686 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2687 currently running.
2688
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002689- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2690 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2691 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2692 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2693
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002694- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2695 as directory names.
2696
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002697- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2698 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2699
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002700- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2701 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2702
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002703- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002704 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2705 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002706
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002707- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2708 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2709 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2710 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2711 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2712
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002713- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2714 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2715 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2716 removed.
2717
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002718- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2719 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2720 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2721
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002722- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2723 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2724 to __debug__.
2725
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002726- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2727 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2728 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2729
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002730- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2731 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2732 deprecated now.
2733
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002734- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2735 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2736 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002737
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002738- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2739 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2740 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2741 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2742 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002743
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002744- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2745 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2746
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002747- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2748 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2749 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002750 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002751 is backward compatible.
2752
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002753- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2754 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2755 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2756 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2757 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2758
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002759- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2760 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2761 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2762 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2763 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2764 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002765
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002766- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2767 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2768
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002769- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2770 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2771
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002772- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2773 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2774 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2775 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2776 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2777
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002778- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2779 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2780 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2781
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002782- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002783 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2784
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002785- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2786 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2787 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002788
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002789- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2790 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2791
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002792- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2793 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2794 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2795
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002796- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2797
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002798Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002799-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002800
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002801- Added three operators to the operator module:
2802 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2803 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2804 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2805
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002806- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2807
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002808- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2809 archives.
2810
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002811- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2812 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2813 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2814
2815 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2816
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002817- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2818 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2819 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002820 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002821
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002822- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2823 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2824 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2825 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002826 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2827 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2828 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2829 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002830
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002831- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2832 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002833
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002834- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2835
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002836- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2837 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2838
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002839- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2840 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2841 supported.
2842
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002843- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2844
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002845- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2846 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002847
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002848- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2849 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2850
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002851- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2852
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002853- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2854 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2855
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002856- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2857 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2858 functions but callable type objects.
2859
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002860- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002861 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002862 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002863
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002864- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2865 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002866
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002867- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2868 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002869
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002870- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2871 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2872 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2873 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2874
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002875- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2876 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002877
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002878- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2879 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2880 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2881 and __imul__.
2882
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002883- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002884 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2885 is called.
2886
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002887- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2888 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2889 interpreter was compiled.
2890
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002891- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2892 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2893 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002894 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002895 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2896 1, not 2.
2897
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002898- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2899 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2900 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2901 limit.
2902
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002903- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2904 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2905 bug #623464.
2906
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002907- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2908 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2909 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2910 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2911
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002912Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002913-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002914
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002915- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2916
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002917- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2918 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2919 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2920 with Python 2.3a2.
2921
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002922- os.path exposes getctime.
2923
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002924- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002925 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002926 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002927 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002928 unit tests of floating point results.
2929
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002930- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2931 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2932 has been increased.
2933
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002934- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2935 executed.
2936
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002937- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2938 postinstallation script.
2939
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002940- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2941 test the current module.
2942
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002943- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002944 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2945 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2946 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2947 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2948
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002949- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002950 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002951 Ward's Optik package.
2952
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002953- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2954 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2955 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2956 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2957
2958- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2959 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002960 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002961
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002962- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2963 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2964 shelf are binary pickles.
2965
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002966- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2967 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2968
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002969- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2970 modules are iterators now.
2971
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002972- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2973 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2974 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2975 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2976 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2977 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002978
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002979- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2980 with their entity value.
2981
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002982- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2983
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002984- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2985 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002986
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002987- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2988 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002989 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002990
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002991- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2992 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2993 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2994 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2995 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2996 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2997 main():
2998
2999 import locale
3000 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3001
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003002- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3003 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3004
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003005- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3006 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3007 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3008 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3009 to the new standard.
3010
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003011- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3012 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3013 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3014 an extension to the database.
3015
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003016- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3017 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3018 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3019 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003020 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003021
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003022- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003023 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003024
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003025- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3026 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3027 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3028 bounded integers.
3029
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003030- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3031 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3032 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3033 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3034 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3035 in existence.
3036
3037 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3038 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3039 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3040 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3041 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3042 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3043
3044 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3045 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3046 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3047 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3048
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003049- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3050 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3051 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3052
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003053- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3054
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003055- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3056 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3057 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3058 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3059
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003060- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3061 argument.
3062
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003063- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3064 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3065 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3066 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3067 [SF patch 560794].
3068
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003069- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3070 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3071 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003072 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3073 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3074 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003075
3076- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3077 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003078
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003079- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3080 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3081 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3082 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003083
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003084- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3085 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3086 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3087 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3088 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3089
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003090- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003091
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003092- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3093
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003094- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3095 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3096 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3097 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3098 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3099 identical to None.
3100
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003101- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3102 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3103 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3104 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3105 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3106 results now.
3107
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003108- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3109 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3110
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003111- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3112 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3113 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3114 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3115 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3116 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3117 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3118 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3119
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003120- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3121
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003122- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3123 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3124
3125- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3126 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3127 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3128 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3129 and other systems.
3130
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003131- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3132 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3133 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3134 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 +00003135 work well with these.
3136
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003137- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3138
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003139- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003140 connections.
3141
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003142- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3143 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3144 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3145
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003146- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3147 sets
3148
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003149- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3150 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3151 name.
3152
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003153- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3154 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3155 passed in.
3156
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003157- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003158 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003159 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3160 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003161
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003162- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3163
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003164- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3165
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003166- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3167 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3168 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3169
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003170- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3171 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3172 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3173 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003174 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003175
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003176- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003177 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003178 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003179
3180- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3181 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3182 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3183
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003184- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003185 the value of its expression argument.
3186
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003187- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3188 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3189 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3190
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003191- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3192 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3193 skipstone browser was included.
3194
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003195- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3196 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3197
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003198Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003199-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003200
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003201- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3202 names in addition to accepting file names.
3203
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003204- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3205 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3206 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3207 still used and useful.)
3208
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003209- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3210 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3211 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3212 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003213
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003214- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3215 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3216 the generated binary.
3217
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003218Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003219-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003220
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003221- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3222
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003223- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3224 except in the hands of experts.
3225
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003226- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003227 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3228 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3229 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003230
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003231- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3232 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3233 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3234 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3235 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3236 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3237 builds.
3238
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003239- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3240 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3241 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3242 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3243 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3244 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3245 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3246 new type.
3247
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003248- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003249
3250 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3251 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3252 positive infinities.
3253
3254 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3255 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3256 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3257 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3258 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3259 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3260 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3261
3262 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3263
3264 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3265
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003266- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3267 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3268 size of the executable.
3269
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003270- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3271 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3272 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3273 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003274
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003275- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3276
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003277- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3278 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3279 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003280
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003281- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3282 well as Unix.
3283
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003284- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3285 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3286 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3287 modules in the README file for details.
3288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003289C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003291
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003292- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3293 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003294 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003295 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003296 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003297
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003298- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3299 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3300 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3301 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3302 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3303 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003304 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003305 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3306 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3307 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3308 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3309 aligned.)
3310
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003311- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3312 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3313 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3314
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003315- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3316 level.
3317
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003318- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3319 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3320 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3321 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3322 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3323
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003324- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3325 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3326 code.
3327
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003328- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3329 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3330 adjusting for negative indices.
3331
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003332- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3333 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3334 object.
3335
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003336- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3337 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3338 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3339
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003340- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3341 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003342
3343- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3344
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003345- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3346 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3347 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3348 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3349
3350- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3351
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003352- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003353
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003354- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003355 without going through the buffer API.
3356
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003358
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003359- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3360 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3361 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3362 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3363
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003364- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3365 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3366
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003367- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003368 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3369
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003370New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003371-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003372
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003373- OpenVMS is now supported.
3374
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003375- AtheOS is now supported.
3376
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003377- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3378
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003379- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3380
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003381Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003382-----
3383
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003384- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3385 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3386 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003387
3388Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003389-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003390
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003391- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3392 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3393 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3394 bugs.
3395 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003396 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003397 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3398 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003399 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003400
3401- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003402 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003403
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003404- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3405 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3406
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003407- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3408 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003409 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003410 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3411
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003412- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3413 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3414 use files" uninstall option).
3415
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003416- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3417
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003418- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3419 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3420
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003421- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3422 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3423 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3424
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003425- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3426 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3427 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3428 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3429 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003430 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3431 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3432 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003433
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003434- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003435 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003436 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3437 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3438 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3439 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3440 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3441 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3442 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3443 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3444 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3445 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3446 work around.
3447
3448- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3449 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3450 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3451 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3452 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3453 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3454 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3455 specified with O_CREAT too).
3456
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003457Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003458----
3459
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003460- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003461
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003462- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3463 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3464 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3465
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003466- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3467 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3468 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3469
3470- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3471 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3472 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3473 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3474 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3475 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3476 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3477 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003478
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003479- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3480 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3481 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003482
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003483- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3484 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3485 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3486 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3487 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003488
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003489- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3490 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3491 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003492
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003493- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3494 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003495
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003496- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3497 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3498 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3499 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3500 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003501
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003502- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3503 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3504 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3505
3506- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3507 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3508 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003509
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003510- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3511 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3512 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3513 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003514 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003515
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003516- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3517 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003518
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003519- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3520 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003521
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003522- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003523 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003524 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3525 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003526
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003527
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003528What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003529===============================
3530
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3532
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003533Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003535
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003536- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3537 with a custom metaclass.
3538
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003539Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003541
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003542- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3543 are proxies.
3544
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003545Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003547
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003548- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3549 very short strings.
3550
3551- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3552 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3553 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3554 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3555 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3556
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003557Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003559
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003560- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3561 close or delete time).
3562
3563- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3564 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3565
3566- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3567
3568- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003569 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003570
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003571Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003572-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003573
3574Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003576
3577C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003579
3580New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003582
3583Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003585
3586Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003588
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003589- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3590
3591- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3592 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3593
3594- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3595 deleted at process exit time.
3596
3597- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3598 in backslash.
3599
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003600Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003602
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003603- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3604 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3605 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3606
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003607
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003608What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003609===========================
3610
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3612
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003613Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003615
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003616- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3617 been extensively updated. See
3618
3619 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3620
3621 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3622
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003623- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3624 deleted!
3625
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003626- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3627 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3628 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3629 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3630 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3631
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003632- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3633
3634 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3635 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3636
3637 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3638 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3639 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3640 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3641 supported anyway.
3642
3643 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3644 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3645
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003646- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3647 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3648 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3649 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3650 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003651
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003652- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3653 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3654 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3655
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003656Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003658
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003659- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3660 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3661 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3662 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3663 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3664 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003665 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3666 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3667 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3668 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003669
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003670- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3671 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3672 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3673
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003674Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003675-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003676
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003677- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3678
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003679Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003681
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003682- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3683 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3684 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3685 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3686 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3687 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3688
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003689- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3690
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003691- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3692
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003693- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3694
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003695- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3696 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3697 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3698
3699- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3700
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003701Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003703
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003704- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3705 off a search on Google.
3706
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003707Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003708-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003709
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003710- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3711 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3712 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3713 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3714 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3715 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3716 other platforms should do likewise.
3717
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003718- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3719 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3720 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3721
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003722C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003724
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003725- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3726 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3727 producing key-value pairs.
3728
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003729- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003730 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003731 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3732 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3733 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3734 previously went unchallenged.
3735
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003736New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003738
3739Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003741
3742Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003744
3745Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003747
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003748- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3749 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003750
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003751- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3752 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3753 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3754 home.
3755
3756
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003757What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003758===========================
3759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3761
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003762Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003764
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003765- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3766 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003767
3768 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003769 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003770
3771 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3772 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003773 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003774 This needs to be documented.
3775
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003776- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3777 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3778
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003779- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3780 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3781 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3782
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003783- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3784 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3785
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003786- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3787 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3788 class forbids it).
3789
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003790- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3791 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3792 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3793
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003794- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3795
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003796Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003798
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003799- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3800 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003801 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003802
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003803- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3804 (like 1 + '').
3805
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003806Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003807-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003808
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003809- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3810 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3811 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3812 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003813 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003814 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3815
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003816- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3817 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3818 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3819 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3820
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003821- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3822 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003823 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3824 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3825 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003826
3827- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3828 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003829
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003830- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3831 bytes on its input.
3832
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003833Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003835
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003836- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003837 convenience function.
3838
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003839- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3840 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3841 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003842 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3843 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3844 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3845 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3846 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3847 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003848
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003849- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3850 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3851 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3852 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3853
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003854- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3855 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3856 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3857
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003858- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3859 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3860 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3861 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3862
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003863- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3864 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003865 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003866 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3867 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3868 new -l and -e options.
3869
3870- statcache is now deprecated.
3871
3872- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3873 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003874 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003875 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3876 time properly taken into account.
3877
3878- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3879 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3880 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3881 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3882
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003883Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003885
3886Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003887-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003888
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003889- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3890 is built with libdb3 if available.
3891
3892- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3893
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003894C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003896
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003897- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3898 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3899 PySequence_Size().
3900
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003901- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3902
3903- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3904 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3905 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3906
3907- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3908 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3909
3910- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3911 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3912
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003913New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003915
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003916- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3917 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3918
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003919- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3920 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3921
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003922- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3923
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003924Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003926
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003927- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3928 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3929
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003930Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003932
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003933Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003935
3936- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3937 removed completely in the next release.
3938
3939- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3940 OSX.
3941
3942- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3943 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3944
3945- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3946
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003947
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003948What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003949===========================
3950
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3952
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003953Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003955
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003956- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003957 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003958 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003959 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3960 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003961 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3962 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003963 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3964 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003965
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003966- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3967 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3968
3969- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3970 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3971
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003972Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003974
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003975- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3976 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3977 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3978 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3979 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3980 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3981 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3982 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3983
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003984- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3985 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3986 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3987 example).
3988
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003989- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003990 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003991 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003992 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003993
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003994- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3995 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3996 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003997 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003998
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003999- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4000 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4001 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4002 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4003 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4004 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4005
4006 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4007
4008 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4009
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004010Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004012
4013- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4014
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004015- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4016
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004017- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4018 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004019
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004020- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4021 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4022 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4023 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4024 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4025 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004026 attributes.
4027
4028- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4029 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4030 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004031
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004032- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4033 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4034 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004035
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004036- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4037 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4038 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004039 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4040 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4041
4042- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4043 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004044
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004045Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004047
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004048- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4049 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4050
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004051- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4052 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4053 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4054 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4055
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004056- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4057 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4058 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4059 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4060
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004061 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4062 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4063 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4064 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4065 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4066 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4067 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4068 without losing information).
4069
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004070- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004071 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4072 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4073 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4074 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4075 module).
4076
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004077 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004078 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4079 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4080 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4081 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004082
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004083- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004084 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4085 encoding.
4086
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004087- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4088 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4089
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004091 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4092
4093- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4094 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4095 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4096 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4097
4098- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4099
4100- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4101 ON, and OFF.
4102
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004103- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4104 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4105
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004106Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004108
4109- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4110 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4111 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004112
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004113- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4114 been added: -X and -E.
4115
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004116Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004118
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004119- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4120 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4121
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004122C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004124
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004125- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4126 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4127 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4128 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4129 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4130
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004131- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4132 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4133 as long) arguments.
4134
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004135- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4136 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4137 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4138 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4139 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4140 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4141
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004142- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4143 input.
4144
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004145New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004147
4148Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004150
4151Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004153
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004154- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4155 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4156 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4157
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004158- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4159 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4160 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004161 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004163 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4164 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4165 import signal
4166 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004167
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004169 while 1:
4170 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004172 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4173 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4174 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4175 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004176
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004177
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004178What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4179===========================
4180
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4182
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004183Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004184--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004185
4186- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4187 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4188 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4189
4190- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4191 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4192 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4193 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4194 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4195 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4196 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004197
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004198- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004199 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004200 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4201 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4202 associate a docstring with a property.
4203
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004204- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4205 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4206 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4207 other built-in object types.
4208
4209- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4210 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4211 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4212 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4213 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4214
4215- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4216 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4217
4218- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4219 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004220 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004221 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4222 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4223 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4224 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4225 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4226
4227- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4228 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4229 class.
4230
4231- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4232 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4233 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4234 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4235
4236- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4237 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4238 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4239 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4240
4241- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4242 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4243
4244- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4245 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4246 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4247 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4248 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004249 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004250 with the same value as s.
4251
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004252- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4253
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004254Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004256
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004257- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4258
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004259- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4260 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4261 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4262 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4263 objects.
4264
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004265- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4266 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004267 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4268 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4269
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004270- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4271 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4272 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4273
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004274Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004276
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004277- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4278 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4279 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4280 by the instances.
4281
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004282- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4283 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4284 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4285
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004286- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4287 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4288 before the entire comparison is complete.
4289
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004290- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4291 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4292 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4293
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004294- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4295 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4296 getwriter().
4297
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004298- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4299 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4300
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004301- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004302 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4303 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4304
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004305- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4306 iterable object.
4307
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004308- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4309 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004310
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004311- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4312 authentication.
4313
4314- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4315 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004316
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004317- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004318 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4319 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4320 a sample driver.)
4321
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004322Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004324
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004325- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4326 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4327 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4328 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4329 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4330 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4331 kernel has large file support.
4332
4333- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4334 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4335 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4336 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4337 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4338
4339- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4340 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4341 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4342
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004343C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004345
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004346- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4347 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4348
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004349New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004351
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004352- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4353 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4354
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004355Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004357
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004358- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4359 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4360 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4361 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4362 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4363
4364- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4365 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4366 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4367 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4368
4369- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4370 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4371
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004372Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004374
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004375- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004376 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4377 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004378
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004379
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004380What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4381===========================
4382
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4384
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004385Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004387
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004388- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4389 big to represent as a C double.
4390
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004391- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4392 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4393 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4394 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4395 restriction).
4396
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004397- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4398 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4399 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4400 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4401 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4402
4403 >>> dir([])
4404 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4405 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4406 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4407 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4408 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4409 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4410 'reverse', 'sort']
4411
4412 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4413
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004414- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004415 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4416 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4417 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4418 OverflowError exception.
4419
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004420- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004421 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004422 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4423 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4424 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4425 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4426 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004427 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4429 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4430
4431 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4432 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4433 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4434 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004435
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004436- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004437 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4438 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4439 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4440 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4441 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4442 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4443 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4444 once it is created.
4445
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004446- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4447 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4448 (key, value) pairs.
4449
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004450- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004451 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4452 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4453
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004454- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4455 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4456 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4457 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4458 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004459
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004460- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004461 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4462 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4463
4464 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4465
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004466- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004467 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4468
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004469Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004470-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004471
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004472- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004473 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4474 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004475
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004476- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4477 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4478 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4479 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4480 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4481 in this area anymore).
4482
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004483- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4484 threading.Timer.
4485
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004486- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4487 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4488
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004489- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004490 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4491
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004492- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004493 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4494 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4495 converted to Python longs.
4496
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004497- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004498 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4499
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004500- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4501 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4502 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4503
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004504Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004506
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004507- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4508 division operators as per PEP 238.
4509
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004510Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004512
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004513- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4514 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4515 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4516 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4517
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004518C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004520
4521- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004522
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004523- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4524 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004525 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004526
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4528 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004529 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004530 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004531
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004532- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004533 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4534 module:
4535
4536 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004537
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004538 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4539 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004540
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004541 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4542 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004543
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004544 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4545
4546 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004548- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004549 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4550 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4551 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004552
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004553New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004555
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004556- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4557 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4558 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4559 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4560 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004561
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004562Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004564
4565Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004567
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004568- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4569 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4570 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4571 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004572 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4573 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4574 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4575 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4576 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004577
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004578- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004579 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4580
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004581
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004582What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4583===========================
4584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4586
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004587Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004589
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004590- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4591 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4592
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004593- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4594 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4595 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004596
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004597- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4598 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4599 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4600 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004601
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004602- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4603
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004605
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004606Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004608
4609- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004610 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004611 the module docstring for details.
4612
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004613Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004615
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004616- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004617 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4618 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4619 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004620
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004621- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4622 Nick Mathewson.
4623
4624Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004626
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004627- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4628 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4629 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4630 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4631 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4632 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4633 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4634 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4635
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004636- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4637 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4638 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4639 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4640
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004641- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4642 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4643 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4644 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4645 come a long way).
4646
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004647- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4648 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4649 write filters for these warnings).
4650
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004651- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4652 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4653 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4654 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4655 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4656
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004657- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4658 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4659 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4660 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4661 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4662 older distribution.
4663
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004664Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004666
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004667- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4668 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004669 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004670
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004671- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4672 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4673 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4674
4675- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4676
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004677- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4678
4679- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4680
4681- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4682
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004684
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004685- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4686
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004687New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004689
4690C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004692
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004693- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4694 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4695 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4696 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4697 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4698 against buffer overruns.
4699
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004700- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004701 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4702 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004703 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4704 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4705 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4706
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004707- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4708 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4709 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4710 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4711 deprecated.
4712
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004713Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004715
4716- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4717 relevant is found.
4718
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004719
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004720What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004721===========================
4722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4724
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004725Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004727
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004728- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4729 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4730 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4731 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4732 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4733 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4734 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4735 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004736 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004737 repaired.
4738
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004739- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004740 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004741 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4742 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4743 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4744 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4745 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4746 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4747 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4748 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4749
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004750- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4751 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4752 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4753 leading BMO character).
4754
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004755- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4756 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4757 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4758
4759 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4760 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4761 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004762
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004763 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4764 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4765 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4766 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4767 for various simple to use conversions.
4768
4769 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4770 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4771
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4773 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4774 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4775 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4776 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4777 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4778 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4779 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4780 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4781 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4782 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4783 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4784 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4785 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4786 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004787
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004788- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4789 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4790 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004791 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004792 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004793
4794 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004795 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4796 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4797 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4798 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4799 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004800 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4801 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004802
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004803 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4804 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4805 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004806 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004807
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004808- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4809 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4810 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4811 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4812 floating arithmetic,
4813
4814 x = 9007199254740992.0
4815 print long(x)
4816
4817 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4818 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4819 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4820 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4821 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4822 functions are of good quality).
4823
4824 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4825 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4826 algorithms to break.
4827
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004828- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4829 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4830 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4831 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4832 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4833 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4834 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4835 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4836 order.
4837
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004838- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4839 operation along the most common code paths.
4840
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004841- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4842 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4843
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004844- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4845 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4846 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4847 {}.update(UserDict())
4848
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004849- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4850 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4851 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4852 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4853 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4854 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4855 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4856 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4857
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004858- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004859 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004861 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004862 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4863 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004864 join() method of strings
4865 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004866 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4867 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004869 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004870
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004871- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4872 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4873
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004874- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4875 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4876
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004877- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4878 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4879 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4880 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4881
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004882- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4883 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004884 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004885 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4886 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004887
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004888- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4889
4890
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004891Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004893
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004894- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004895 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004896 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4897 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4898
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004899- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4900 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4901
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004902- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4903 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4904 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4905 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4906
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004907- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4908 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4909 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4910
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004911- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4912
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004913- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4914
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004915- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4916 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4917 that are still imported into string.py).
4918
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004919- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4920
4921- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4922 Now it does.
4923
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004924- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4925
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004926- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4927 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4928 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4929 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4930 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004931 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4932 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004933
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004934- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4935 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4936 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4937 'help(object)'.
4938
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004939Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004941
4942- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004943 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004944 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4945 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4946
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004947- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004948 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4949 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004950
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004951C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004953
4954- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4955 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956
4957----
4958
4959**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**