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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000015- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
16 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
17
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000018- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
19
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000020- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
21 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
22
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000023- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
24
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000025- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
26
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000027- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
28 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
29
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000030- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
31 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
32 Fixes bug #858016 .
33
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000034- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
35 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
36 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
37
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000038- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
39 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
40 improves their performance (about 35%).
41
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000042- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
43 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
44 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
45
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000046- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
47 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
48 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
49 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
50
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000051- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
52 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
53 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
54 length is not known).
55
56- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
57 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000058 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
59 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000060 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
61
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000062- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
63 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
64
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000065- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
66 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
67 keyword arguments.
68
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000069- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
70 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
71 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
72
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000073- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
74 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
75 cases.
76
77- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
78 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
79 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
80 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
81 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
82 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
83 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
84 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
85 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
86 a release build.
87
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000088- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
89 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
90
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000091- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000092 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000093
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000094- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
95 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
96 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
97 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
98 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
99 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
100 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
101 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
102 destroyed.
103
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000104- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
105 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
106 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
107 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
108 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
109 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
110 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
111 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
112
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000113- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
114 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
115 character other than a space.
116
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000117- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
118 by the function object or by the method object, the function
119 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
120 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
121 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
122 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
123 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
124 attributes with the same name.
125
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000126- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
127 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
128 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
129 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
130 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
131 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
132 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
133 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
134 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
135 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
136 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
137 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
138 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
139 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000140
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000141- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
142 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
143 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
144 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
145 This has been repaired.
146
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000147- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
148
149- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
150
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000151- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
152 over a sequence.
153
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000154- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000155 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000156
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000157- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
158
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000159- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
160 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
161 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
162 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
163 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
164 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
165 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
166 records with equal keys is unchanged).
167
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000168- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
169 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
170 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
171
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000172- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
173 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
174 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
175 freelist.
176
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000177- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
178 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
179
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000180- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
181 number.
182
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000183- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
184 a TypeError exception.
185
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000186- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
187 820195.
188
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000189- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
190 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
191 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
192
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000193- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
194 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
195 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000196
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000197- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
198 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
199 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
200
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000201- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
202 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000203 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000204
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000205- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000206 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
207 the first call.
208
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000209
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000210Extension modules
211-----------------
212
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000213- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
214 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
215
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000216- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
217 fewer false positives.
218
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000219- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
220 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
221
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000222- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
223 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
224
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000225- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
226 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000227 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
228 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
229 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000230
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000231- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
232 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
233 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
234 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
235
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000236- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
237 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
238 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
239 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
240 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
241 #897625.
242
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000243- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
244 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
245
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000246- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
247 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
248 and pops on either side of the deque.
249
250- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
251 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
252
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000253- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
254 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
255 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
256 other functions that expect a function argument.
257
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000258- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
259
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000260- os.getsid was added.
261
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000262- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
263 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
264 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
265
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000266- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
267
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000268- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
269
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000270- readline.clear_history was added.
271
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000272- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
273
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000274- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
275
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000276- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
277
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000278- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
279
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000280- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
281
282- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
283
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000284- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
285
286- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
287
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000288- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
289 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
290 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
291
292- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
293 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
294 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
295 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
296 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
297 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
298 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
299
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000300- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
301 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
302 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
303 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000304
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000305- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
306 iterators from a single iterable.
307
308- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
309 of raising a TypeError exception.
310
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000311- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
312 as parameter.
313
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000314Library
315-------
316
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000317- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
318 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
319 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
320
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000321- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
322 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
323 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
324
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000325- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
326
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000327- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
328
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000329- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
330 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
331
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000332- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
333 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
334 type pattern with the same value exists.
335
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000336- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
337 when run from the command prompt).
338
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000339- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
340 not taken into consideration when caching value.
341
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000342- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
343 default sort).
344
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000345- Added global runctx function to profile module
346
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000347- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
348
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000349- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
350
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000351- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
352
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000353- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
354 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
355 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
356 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
357 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
358 accordingly.
359
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000360- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
361 decoding standards.
362
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000363- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
364 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
365 called for all requests.
366
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000367- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
368 they are passed to the compiler.
369
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000370- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
371 indent, width and depth.
372
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000373- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
374 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
375
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000376- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
377 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
378
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000379- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
380
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000381- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
382
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000383- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
384
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000385- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
386 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
387
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000388- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
389 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000390
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000391- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
392 a string).
393
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000394- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
395
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000396- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
397
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000398- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
399
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000400- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
401
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000402- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
403 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
404 list of fieldnames.
405
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000406- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
407 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
408
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000409- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
410
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000411- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
412 empty lists.
413
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000414- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
415 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
416 and shelves.
417
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000418- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
419 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
420
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000421- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000422 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
423 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000424
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000425- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
426 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000427 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000428
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000429- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000430 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
431 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
432
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000433- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
434 and removed in Py2.4.
435
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000436- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
437
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000438- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
439
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000440Tools/Demos
441-----------
442
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000443- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
444 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
445
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000446- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
447
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000448- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
449 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
450 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
451 destination in situations where both files are given.
452
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000453- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
454 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
455 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
456 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
457
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000458- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
459
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000460- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
461 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
462 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
463 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
464 now.
465
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000466- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
467 in effect
468
469- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
470 C-c C-h
471
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000472- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
473 -d option was given.
474
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000475Build
476-----
477
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000478- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
479 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
480
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000481- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
482 removed.
483
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000484- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
485 supported (see PEP 11).
486
487- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
488
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000489- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
490
491- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
492 (see PEP 11).
493
494- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
495 sizeof(char) must be 1.
496
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000497C API
498-----
499
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000500- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
501 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000502 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
503 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000504
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000505- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
506 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
507
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000508- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
509 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
510 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
511 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
512 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
513
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000514- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
515 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
516 about 10% faster.
517
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000518- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
519 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
520
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000521- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
522 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
523 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
524 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
525
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000526New platforms
527-------------
528
529Tests
530-----
531
532Windows
533-------
534
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000535- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
536 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
537 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
538 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
539
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000540- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
541 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
542 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
543
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000544Mac
545----
546
547
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000548What's New in Python 2.3 final?
549===============================
550
551*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
552
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000553IDLE
554----
555
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000556- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
557 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
558 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
559 context-menu actions.
560
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000561- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
562 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
563 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
564 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
565 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
566 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
567 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
568 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
569 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
570
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000571
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000572What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
573=============================================
574
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000575*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000576
577Core and builtins
578-----------------
579
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000580- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000581 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000582 comment at the end are still unsupported.
583
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000584Extension modules
585-----------------
586
587- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
588 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
589 than once. This has been fixed.
590
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000591- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
592 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
593 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
594 call.
595
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000596- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
597
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000598Library
599-------
600
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000601- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
602 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
603
604- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
605 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
606 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
607 restored.
608
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000609IDLE
610----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000611
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000612- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000613
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000614Build
615-----
616
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000617- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
618 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
619
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000620C API
621-----
622
623Windows
624-------
625
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000626- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
627 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
628
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000629- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
630
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000631Mac
632---
633
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000634- Various fixes to pimp.
635
636- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
637
638- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
639 more problems than it solves.
640
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000641
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000642What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
643=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000644
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000645*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
646
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000647Core and builtins
648-----------------
649
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000650- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
651 by sys.setcheckinterval().
652
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000653- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
654 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000655 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000656
657- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
658 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
659 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000660 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000661
662- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
663 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000664
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000665- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
666 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
667 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
668
669- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000670 770247.
671
672- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000673
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000674Extension modules
675-----------------
676
677- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
678 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
679
680- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
681
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000682- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
683
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000684- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
685 contained within the _strptime module.
686
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000687- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
688 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
689
690- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000691 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
692
693- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
694 the find_class attribute, if present.
695
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000696- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000697
698 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
699 (SF bug 763298).
700
701 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000702 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
703 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
704 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000705
706 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
707
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000708Library
709-------
710
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000711- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
712
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000713- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
714 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
715 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
716 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
717 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
718 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
719 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
720 or Tester().
721
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000722- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
723 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
724 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
725 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
726 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
727 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
728 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
729 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
730 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000731
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000732 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000733
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000734- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
735 weren't before was an oversight.
736
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000737- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
738 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
739
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000740- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
741 when there are no lines.
742
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000743- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
744 which could occur with Tk 8.4
745
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000746- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
747 to child processes.
748
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000749- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
750
751- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
752
753- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
754 xmlrpclib.
755
756- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
757 responses.
758
759- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
760 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
761
762- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
763 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
764 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
765
766- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
767 used as patterns.
768
769- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
770 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
771 than Tk 8.3.
772
773- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
774
775- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000776
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000777Tools/Demos
778-----------
779
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000780- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
781
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000782- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
783
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000784- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000785
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000786Build
787-----
788
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000789- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
790
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000791- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
792
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000793- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
794 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000795
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000796- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
797 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
798 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000799
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000800C API
801-----
802
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000803- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
804 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
805
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000806Windows
807-------
808
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000809- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
810 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
811 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
812 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
813 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
814 Python exception ::
815
816 thread.error: can't start new thread
817
818 is raised now.
819
820- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
821 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
822 instead of from DLL teardown.
823
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000824Mac
825---
826
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000827- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000828 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000829 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
830 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
831 the executable in the bundle.
832
833- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000834
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000835- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
836
837- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
838 on Panther.
839
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000840What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
841================================
842
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000843*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000844
845Core and builtins
846-----------------
847
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000848- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
849 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
850 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
851 with the -i option.
852
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000853- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
854 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
855
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000856- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
857 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
858
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000859- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
860 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
861 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
862 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
863 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
864 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
865 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
866 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
867 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
868 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
869 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
870 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
871 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000872
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000873- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
874 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
875 embedded in a lambda expression.
876
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000877- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
878 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
879 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
880 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
881 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
882
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000883- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
884 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
885 matches the restriction on classic classes.
886
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000887- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
888 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
889
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000890- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
891 It's writable again.
892
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000893- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
894 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
895 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000896 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000897
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000898- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
899 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
900 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
901
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000902Extension modules
903-----------------
904
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000905- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
906 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
907
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000908- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
909 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
910 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
911 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
912
913- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
914 collection.
915
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000916- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
917 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
918 unique within a single program run.
919
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000920- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
921 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
922
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000923- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
924 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
925
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000926- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
927 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000928
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000929- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
930
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000931- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
932 Fixes SF bug #730685.
933
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000934- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
935 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
936 for many BSD-derived systems.
937
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000938
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000939Library
940-------
941
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000942- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
943 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
944 primary ones:
945
946 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
947 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
948 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
949
950 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
951 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
952 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
953 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
954 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
955 framework features (which doctest lacks).
956
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000957- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
958 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
959 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
960 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
961 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
962 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
963 argument.
964
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000965- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
966 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
967 in the archive.
968
969- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
970 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
971
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000972- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
973 569574).
974
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000975- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
976 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
977 no more.
978
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000979- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
980 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
981 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
982 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
983 code coverage.
984
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000985- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
986 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
987 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000988 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
989 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000990
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000991- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
992 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
993 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000994 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000995
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000996- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
997
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000998- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
999 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1000 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1001 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1002
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001003- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1004 handling.
1005
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001006- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1007 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1008
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001009- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1010 in socket.py.
1011
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001012- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1013
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001014- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1015 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1016 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1017 opener with proxy support.
1018
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001019- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1020
1021- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1022
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001023Tools/Demos
1024-----------
1025
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001026- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1027
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001028- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1029
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001030- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1031 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001032
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001033- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1034 files.
1035
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001036Build
1037-----
1038
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001039- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001040 different root directory.
1041
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001042C API
1043-----
1044
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001045- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1046 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1047 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1048 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1049 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1050 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1051 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1052 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1053 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1054 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1055
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001056- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1057 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1058 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1059 from Python.
1060
1061
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001062New platforms
1063-------------
1064
1065None this time.
1066
1067Tests
1068-----
1069
1070- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1071 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1072
1073Windows
1074-------
1075
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001076- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1077
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001078- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1079 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1080 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1081 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1082 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1083 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1084 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1085 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1086 that's what it's for.
1087
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001088Mac
1089---
1090
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001091- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1092 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1093 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1094 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001095- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1096 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1097- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001098
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001099SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1100------------------------------------
1101
1102430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1103598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1104622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1105661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1106683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1107697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1108713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1109724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1110727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1111729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1112730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1113731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1114732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1115733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1116735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1117740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1118744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1119745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1120747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1121749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1122751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1123753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1124755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1125757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1126760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1127
1128
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001129What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1130================================
1131
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001132*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001133
1134Core and builtins
1135-----------------
1136
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001137- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1138 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1139
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001140- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1141 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1142 and cannot be strings).
1143
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001144- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1145 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1146 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1147 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1148
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001149- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1150 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1151 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1152 Python itself.
1153
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001154- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1155 the referenced object, if it has one.
1156
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001157- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1158 the thread started at
1159 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1160
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001161- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1162 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1163 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1164 placed on a list index.
1165
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001166- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1167 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1168 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1169 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1170
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001171- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1172 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1173 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1174 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1175 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1176 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1177 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1178
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001179- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1180 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1181 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1182 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1183 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1184
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001185- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1186 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001187
1188- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1189 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1190 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1191 #693195.)
1192
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001193- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1194 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001195
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001196- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001197 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001198 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1199 interpreter executions, would fail.
1200
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001201- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001202 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001203 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001204
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001205Extension modules
1206-----------------
1207
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001208- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1209 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1210 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1211 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1212
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001213- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1214 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1215
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001216- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1217 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1218 and Greg Chapman.)
1219
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001220- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1221 recursively.
1222
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001223- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001224 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1225 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1226 leaks.
1227
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001228- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1229
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001230- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1231 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1232 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1233 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1234 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1235 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1236 #705836.
1237
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001238- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001239 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1240
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001241- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1242 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1243 See SF bug #692416.
1244
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001245- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1246 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1247
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001248- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1249 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1250 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001251
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001252- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001253 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1254 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1255
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001256- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1257 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1258 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1259 timeouts to work properly.
1260
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001261Library
1262-------
1263
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001264- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1265 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1266 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1267 future release.
1268
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001269- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1270 for querying platform dependent features.
1271
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001272- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001273
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001274- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1275 pickle protocol versions.
1276
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001277- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1278 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1279 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1280
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001281- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1282
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001283- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1284 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1285 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1286 modules.
1287
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001288- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1289 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1290 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1291
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001292- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1293 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1294
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001295- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1296 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1297 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1298
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001299- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001300 MS Office extensions.
1301
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001302- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1303 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1304
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001305- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1306 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1307
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001308- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1309 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1310 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1311 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1312 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1313 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1314
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001315- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1316 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1317 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001318
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001319- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1320 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1321 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1322
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001323- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1324
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001325- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1326 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1327 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1328
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001329Tools/Demos
1330-----------
1331
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001332- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1333 See the module docstring for details.
1334
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001335Build
1336-----
1337
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001338- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1339 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001340
1341C API
1342-----
1343
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001344- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1345
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001346- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1347 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1348 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1349
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001350- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1351 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001352
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001353 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1354 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1355 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001356
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001357- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001358 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1359
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001360- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1361 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1362 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001363
1364New platforms
1365-------------
1366
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001367None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001368
1369Tests
1370-----
1371
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001372- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1373 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001374
1375Windows
1376-------
1377
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001378- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1379 function.
1380
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001381- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1382 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001383
1384Mac
1385---
1386
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001387- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1388 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001389
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001390- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1391 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001392
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001393- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1394 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1395 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001396
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001397- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001398 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1399 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001400
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001401- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1402 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001403
1404
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001405What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1406=================================
1407
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001408*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001409
1410Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001411-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001412
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001413- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1414 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1415 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1416
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001417- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1418 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1419 (SF patch #664376.)
1420
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001421- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1422 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1423 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1424 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1425 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1426 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001427 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001428
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001429- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1430 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1431 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1432 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001433 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001434
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001435- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1436 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1437 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1438 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1439 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1440 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1441 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1442 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1443 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1444 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1445 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1446
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001447- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1448 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1449 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1450 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1451 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1452 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1453
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001454- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1455 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1456
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001457- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1458 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1459 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1460 case.)
1461
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001462- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1463 passed as unicode strings.
1464
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001465- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1466 See SF bug #683467.
1467
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001468- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1469 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1470
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001471- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1472
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001473- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1474
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001475- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1476 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1477 arguments.
1478
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001479- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1480 See SF bug #667147.
1481
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001482- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001483 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001484 See SF bug #676155.
1485
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001486- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001487 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001488 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1489 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1490 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1491 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1492 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1493 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001494
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001495Extension modules
1496-----------------
1497
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001498- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1499 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1500 tp_as_number pointer.
1501
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001502- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1503 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1504 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1505 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1506 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1507
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001508- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1509
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001510- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1511
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001512- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001513 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001514 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1515 patch #678531.)
1516
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001517- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1518 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1519
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001520- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1521 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1522
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001523- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1524
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001525- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1526 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1527 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1528
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001529- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1530
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001531- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1532 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1533
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001534- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001535
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001536- datetime changes:
1537
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001538 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1539
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001540 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1541 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1542 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1543 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1544 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1545 now.
1546
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001547 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001548 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1549 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001550
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001551 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001552 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001553 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1554 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1555 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1556 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001557
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001558 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1559 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1560 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001561 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1562
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001563 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1564 by a later example coded by Guido.
1565
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001566 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001567 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1568 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1569 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001570 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1571 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1572
1573 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1574 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1575 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1576 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1577 tzinfo subclass instance.
1578
1579 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1580 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1581 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1582 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1583 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1584 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1585 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1586 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001587
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001588 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1589 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1590 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1591 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1592 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001593 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1594
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001595 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001596
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001597 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1598 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1599 as a naive datetime object.
1600
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001601 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1602 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1603 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1604
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001605 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1606 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1607 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1608 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1609 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1610 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1611 comparison.
1612
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001613 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1614 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1615 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1616 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001617 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001618
1619 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001620
1621 and ::
1622
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001623 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1624
1625 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1626 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1627 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1628 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1629
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001630 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1631 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1632 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1633 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1634 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1635
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001636 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1637 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001638 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1639 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001640
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001641Library
1642-------
1643
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001644- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1645 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1646
1647- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1648 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1649 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1650 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1651 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1652 See PEP 307 for details.
1653
1654- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1655 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1656
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001657- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1658 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001659 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001660 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1661 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001662 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001663
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001664- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1665 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1666
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001667- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1668 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1669 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1670
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001671- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1672
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001673- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1674 exception.
1675
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001676- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1677 class.
1678
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001679- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1680 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1681 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1682
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001683- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1684 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1685
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001686- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001687 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1688 See SF bug #659228.
1689
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001690- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1691 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1692 See SF patch #651082.
1693
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001694- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001695
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001696- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1697 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1698
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001699- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001700 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001701
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001702- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1703 DOS paths from other platforms.
1704
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001705Tools/Demos
1706-----------
1707
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001708- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1709 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1710 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1711 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1712 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1713 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1714 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1715 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1716 example:
1717
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001718 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1719 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001720
1721 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1722
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001723
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001724Build
1725-----
1726
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001727- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1728 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1729 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001730 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1731
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001732 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1733
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001734- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1735 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1736 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1737 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1738 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1739 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1740 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1741 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1742 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1743
1744- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1745 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1746 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1747 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1748
1749- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1750 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1751
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001752C API
1753-----
1754
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001755- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1756 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001757
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001758- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1759 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1760 tp_as_number pointer.
1761
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001762- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1763 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1764 (SF #681367)
1765
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001766- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1767 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1768 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1769 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001770
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001771Tests
1772-----
1773
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001774- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001775 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1776 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1777 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1778 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1779 pydoc.)
1780
1781- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1782
1783- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001784
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001785Windows
1786-------
1787
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001788- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1789 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1790 time).
1791
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001792- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1793 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1794
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001795- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1796 release without strong cryptography.
1797
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001798- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001799 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001800
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001801- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1802 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1803
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001804Mac
1805---
1806
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001807- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1808 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001809
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001810- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1811 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1812 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001813
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001814- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1815 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001816
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001817- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1818 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1819 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1820 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001821
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001822- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001823 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1824 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1825 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001826
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001827
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001828What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001829=================================
1830
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001831*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001832
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001833Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001834--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001835
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001836- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1837
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001838- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1839 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001840 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001841 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001842 a different meaning than before.
1843
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001844- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001845 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001846 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001847
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001848- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001849 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001850 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001851
1852- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1853 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1854 and deallocation.
1855
1856- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1857 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1858
1859- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1860 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1861 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1862 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1863 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1864
1865- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1866 now detected by the garbage collector.
1867
1868- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1869 [SF bug 519621]
1870
1871- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1872 identifier.
1873
1874- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1875 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1876 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1877 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1878 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1879 [SF bug 563060]
1880
1881- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1882 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1883 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1884 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1885 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1886
1887- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1888 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1889 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1890
1891- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1892
1893- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1894 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1895 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1896 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1897 state of the slots would be lost.)
1898
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001899Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001900-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001901
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001902- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001903 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1904 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1905 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1906 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001907 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1908 Jython 2.1.
1909
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001910- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001911 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001912 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1913 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1914 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1915 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1916 these, see PEP 302.
1917
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001918- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1919 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1920 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1921
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001922- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1923 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1924 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1925
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001926- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1927 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1928 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1929
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001930- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1931 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1932 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1933 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1934 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1935 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1936 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1937 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1938 releases or implementations.
1939
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001940- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001941 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1942 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001943
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001944- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1945 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1946
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001947- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1948 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1949 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1950
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001951- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1952 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1953
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001954- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1955 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001956 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1957 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001958
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001959- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1960 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1961 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1962 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1963 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1964
1965 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1966 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1967 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1968 pattern.
1969
1970 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1971 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1972 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1973 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1974
1975 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1976 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1977 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1978 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1979 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1980 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1981
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001982- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1983 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1984 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1985 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1986 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1987 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1988 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1989 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001990
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001991- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1992 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1993 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1994 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1995 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001996 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1997 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1998 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1999 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2000 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2001 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2002 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002003
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002004- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2005 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2006
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002007- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2008 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2009 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2010 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2011 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2012 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2013 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2014 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2015 to Zack Weinberg!
2016
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002017- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2018 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2019 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2020 type. This has been fixed now.
2021
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002022- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2023 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2024 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2025
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002026- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2027 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2028 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2029 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2030 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2031 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2032 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2033 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002034 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002035
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002036- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2037 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2038 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002039
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002040- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2041 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2042 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2043 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2044 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2045 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2046 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2047 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002048 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002049 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2050 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2051
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002052- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2053 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2054 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2055 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2056 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2057 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2058 this.)
2059
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002060- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2061 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002062 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002063 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002064 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2065 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002066 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2067 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002068
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002069- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2070 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2071 currently running.
2072
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002073- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2074 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2075 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2076 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2077
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002078- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2079 as directory names.
2080
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002081- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2082 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2083
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002084- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2085 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2086
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002087- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002088 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2089 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002090
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002091- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2092 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2093 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2094 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2095 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2096
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002097- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2098 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2099 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2100 removed.
2101
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002102- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2103 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2104 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2105
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002106- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2107 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2108 to __debug__.
2109
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002110- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2111 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2112 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2113
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002114- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2115 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2116 deprecated now.
2117
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002118- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2119 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2120 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002121
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002122- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2123 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2124 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2125 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2126 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002127
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002128- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2129 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2130
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002131- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2132 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2133 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002134 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002135 is backward compatible.
2136
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002137- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2138 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2139 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2140 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2141 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2142
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002143- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2144 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2145 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2146 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2147 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2148 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002149
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002150- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2151 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2152
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002153- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2154 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2155
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002156- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2157 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2158 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2159 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2160 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2161
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002162- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2163 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2164 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2165
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002166- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002167 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2168
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002169- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2170 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2171 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002172
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002173- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2174 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2175
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002176- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2177 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2178 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2179
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002180- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2181
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002182Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002183-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002184
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002185- Added three operators to the operator module:
2186 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2187 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2188 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2189
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002190- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2191
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002192- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2193 archives.
2194
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002195- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2196 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2197 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2198
2199 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2200
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002201- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2202 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2203 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002204 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002205
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002206- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2207 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2208 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2209 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002210 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2211 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2212 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2213 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002214
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002215- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2216 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002217
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002218- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2219
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002220- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2221 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2222
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002223- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2224 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2225 supported.
2226
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002227- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2228
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002229- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2230 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002231
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002232- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2233 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2234
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002235- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2236
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002237- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2238 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2239
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002240- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2241 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2242 functions but callable type objects.
2243
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002244- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002245 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002246 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002247
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002248- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2249 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002250
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002251- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2252 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002253
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002254- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2255 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2256 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2257 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2258
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002259- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2260 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002261
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002262- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2263 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2264 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2265 and __imul__.
2266
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002267- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002268 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2269 is called.
2270
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002271- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2272 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2273 interpreter was compiled.
2274
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002275- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2276 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2277 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002278 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002279 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2280 1, not 2.
2281
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002282- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2283 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2284 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2285 limit.
2286
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002287- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2288 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2289 bug #623464.
2290
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002291- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2292 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2293 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2294 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2295
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002296Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002297-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002298
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002299- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2300
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002301- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2302 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2303 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2304 with Python 2.3a2.
2305
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002306- os.path exposes getctime.
2307
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002308- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002309 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002310 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002311 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002312 unit tests of floating point results.
2313
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002314- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2315 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2316 has been increased.
2317
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002318- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2319 executed.
2320
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002321- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2322 postinstallation script.
2323
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002324- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2325 test the current module.
2326
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002327- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002328 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2329 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2330 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2331 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2332
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002333- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002334 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002335 Ward's Optik package.
2336
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002337- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2338 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2339 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2340 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2341
2342- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2343 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002344 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002345
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002346- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2347 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2348 shelf are binary pickles.
2349
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002350- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2351 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2352
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002353- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2354 modules are iterators now.
2355
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002356- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2357 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2358 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2359 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2360 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2361 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002362
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002363- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2364 with their entity value.
2365
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002366- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2367
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002368- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2369 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002370
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002371- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2372 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002373 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002374
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002375- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2376 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2377 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2378 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2379 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2380 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2381 main():
2382
2383 import locale
2384 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2385
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002386- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2387 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2388
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002389- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2390 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2391 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2392 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2393 to the new standard.
2394
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002395- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2396 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2397 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2398 an extension to the database.
2399
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002400- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2401 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2402 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2403 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002404 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002405
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002406- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002407 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002408
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002409- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2410 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2411 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2412 bounded integers.
2413
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002414- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2415 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2416 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2417 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2418 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2419 in existence.
2420
2421 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2422 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2423 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2424 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2425 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2426 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2427
2428 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2429 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2430 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2431 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2432
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002433- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2434 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2435 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2436
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002437- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2438
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002439- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2440 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2441 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2442 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2443
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002444- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2445 argument.
2446
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002447- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2448 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2449 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2450 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2451 [SF patch 560794].
2452
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002453- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2454 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2455 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002456 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2457 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2458 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002459
2460- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2461 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002462
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002463- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2464 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2465 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2466 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002467
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002468- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2469 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2470 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2471 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2472 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2473
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002474- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002475
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002476- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2477
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002478- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2479 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2480 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2481 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2482 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2483 identical to None.
2484
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002485- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2486 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2487 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2488 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2489 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2490 results now.
2491
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002492- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2493 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2494
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002495- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2496 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2497 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2498 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2499 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2500 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2501 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2502 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2503
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002504- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2505
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002506- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2507 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2508
2509- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2510 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2511 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2512 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2513 and other systems.
2514
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002515- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2516 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2517 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2518 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 +00002519 work well with these.
2520
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002521- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2522
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002523- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002524 connections.
2525
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002526- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2527 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2528 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2529
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002530- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2531 sets
2532
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002533- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2534 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2535 name.
2536
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002537- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2538 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2539 passed in.
2540
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002541- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002542 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002543 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2544 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002545
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002546- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2547
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002548- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2549
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002550- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2551 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2552 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2553
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002554- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2555 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2556 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2557 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002558 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002559
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002560- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002561 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002562 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002563
2564- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2565 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2566 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2567
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002568- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002569 the value of its expression argument.
2570
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002571- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2572 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2573 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2574
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002575- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2576 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2577 skipstone browser was included.
2578
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002579- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2580 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2581
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002582Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002583-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002584
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002585- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2586 names in addition to accepting file names.
2587
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002588- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2589 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2590 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2591 still used and useful.)
2592
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002593- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2594 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2595 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2596 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002597
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002598- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2599 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2600 the generated binary.
2601
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002602Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002603-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002604
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002605- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2606
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002607- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2608 except in the hands of experts.
2609
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002610- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002611 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2612 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2613 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002614
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002615- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2616 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2617 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2618 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2619 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2620 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2621 builds.
2622
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002623- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2624 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2625 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2626 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2627 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2628 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2629 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2630 new type.
2631
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002632- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002633
2634 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2635 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2636 positive infinities.
2637
2638 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2639 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2640 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2641 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2642 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2643 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2644 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2645
2646 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2647
2648 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2649
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002650- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2651 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2652 size of the executable.
2653
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002654- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2655 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2656 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2657 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002658
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002659- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2660
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002661- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2662 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2663 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002664
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002665- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2666 well as Unix.
2667
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002668- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2669 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2670 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2671 modules in the README file for details.
2672
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002673C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002674-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002675
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002676- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2677 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002678 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002679 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002680 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002681
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002682- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2683 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2684 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2685 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2686 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2687 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002688 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002689 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2690 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2691 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2692 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2693 aligned.)
2694
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002695- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2696 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2697 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2698
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002699- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2700 level.
2701
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002702- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2703 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2704 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2705 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2706 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2707
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002708- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2709 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2710 code.
2711
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002712- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2713 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2714 adjusting for negative indices.
2715
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002716- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2717 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2718 object.
2719
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002720- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2721 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2722 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2723
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002724- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2725 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002726
2727- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2728
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002729- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2730 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2731 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2732 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2733
2734- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2735
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002736- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002737
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002738- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002739 without going through the buffer API.
2740
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002742
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002743- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2744 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2745 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2746 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2747
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002748- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2749 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2750
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002751- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002752 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2753
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002754New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002755-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002756
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002757- OpenVMS is now supported.
2758
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002759- AtheOS is now supported.
2760
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002761- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2762
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002763- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2764
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002765Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002766-----
2767
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002768- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2769 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2770 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002771
2772Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002773-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002774
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002775- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2776 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2777 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2778 bugs.
2779 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002780 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002781 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2782 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002783 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002784
2785- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002786 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002787
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002788- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2789 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2790
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002791- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2792 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002793 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002794 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2795
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002796- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2797 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2798 use files" uninstall option).
2799
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002800- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2801
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002802- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2803 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2804
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002805- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2806 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2807 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2808
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002809- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2810 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2811 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2812 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2813 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002814 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2815 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2816 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002817
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002818- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002819 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002820 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2821 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2822 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2823 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2824 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2825 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2826 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2827 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2828 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2829 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2830 work around.
2831
2832- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2833 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2834 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2835 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2836 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2837 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2838 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2839 specified with O_CREAT too).
2840
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002841Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002842----
2843
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002844- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002845
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002846- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2847 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2848 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2849
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002850- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2851 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2852 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2853
2854- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2855 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2856 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2857 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2858 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2859 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2860 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2861 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002862
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002863- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2864 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2865 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002866
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002867- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2868 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2869 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2870 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2871 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002872
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002873- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2874 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2875 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002876
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002877- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2878 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002879
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002880- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2881 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2882 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2883 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2884 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002885
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002886- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2887 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2888 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2889
2890- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2891 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2892 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002893
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002894- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2895 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2896 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2897 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002898 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002899
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002900- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2901 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002902
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002903- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2904 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002905
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002906- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002907 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002908 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2909 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002910
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002911
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002912What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002913===============================
2914
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002915*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2916
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002917Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002918--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002919
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002920- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2921 with a custom metaclass.
2922
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002923Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002924-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002925
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002926- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2927 are proxies.
2928
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002929Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002930-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002931
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002932- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2933 very short strings.
2934
2935- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2936 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2937 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2938 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2939 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2940
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002941Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002943
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002944- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2945 close or delete time).
2946
2947- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2948 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2949
2950- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2951
2952- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002953 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002954
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002955Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002956-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002957
2958Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002959-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002960
2961C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002962-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002963
2964New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002965-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002966
2967Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002968-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002969
2970Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002971-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002972
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002973- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2974
2975- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2976 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2977
2978- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2979 deleted at process exit time.
2980
2981- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2982 in backslash.
2983
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002984Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002986
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002987- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2988 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2989 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2990
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002991
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002992What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002993===========================
2994
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2996
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002997Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002999
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003000- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3001 been extensively updated. See
3002
3003 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3004
3005 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3006
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003007- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3008 deleted!
3009
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003010- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3011 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3012 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3013 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3014 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3015
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003016- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3017
3018 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3019 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3020
3021 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3022 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3023 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3024 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3025 supported anyway.
3026
3027 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3028 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3029
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003030- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3031 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3032 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3033 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3034 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003035
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003036- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3037 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3038 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3039
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003040Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003042
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003043- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3044 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3045 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3046 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3047 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3048 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003049 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3050 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3051 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3052 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003053
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003054- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3055 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3056 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3057
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003058Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003059-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003060
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003061- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3062
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003063Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003064-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003065
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003066- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3067 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3068 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3069 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3070 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3071 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3072
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003073- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3074
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003075- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3076
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003077- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3078
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003079- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3080 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3081 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3082
3083- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3084
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003085Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003086-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003087
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003088- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3089 off a search on Google.
3090
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003091Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003092-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003093
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003094- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3095 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3096 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3097 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3098 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3099 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3100 other platforms should do likewise.
3101
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003102- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3103 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3104 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3105
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003106C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003107-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003108
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003109- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3110 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3111 producing key-value pairs.
3112
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003113- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003114 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003115 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3116 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3117 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3118 previously went unchallenged.
3119
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003120New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003121-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003122
3123Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003125
3126Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003127-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003128
3129Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003130----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003131
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003132- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3133 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003134
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003135- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3136 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3137 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3138 home.
3139
3140
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003141What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003142===========================
3143
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3145
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003146Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003147--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003148
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003149- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3150 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003151
3152 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003153 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003154
3155 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3156 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003157 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003158 This needs to be documented.
3159
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003160- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3161 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3162
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003163- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3164 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3165 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3166
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003167- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3168 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3169
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003170- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3171 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3172 class forbids it).
3173
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003174- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3175 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3176 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3177
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003178- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3179
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003180Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003182
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003183- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3184 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003185 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003186
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003187- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3188 (like 1 + '').
3189
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003190Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003192
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003193- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3194 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3195 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3196 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003197 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003198 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3199
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003200- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3201 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3202 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3203 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3204
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003205- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3206 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003207 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3208 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3209 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003210
3211- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3212 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003213
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003214- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3215 bytes on its input.
3216
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003217Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003219
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003220- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003221 convenience function.
3222
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003223- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3224 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3225 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003226 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3227 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3228 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3229 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3230 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3231 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003232
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003233- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3234 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3235 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3236 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3237
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003238- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3239 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3240 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3241
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003242- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3243 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3244 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3245 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3246
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003247- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3248 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003250 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3251 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3252 new -l and -e options.
3253
3254- statcache is now deprecated.
3255
3256- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3257 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003258 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003259 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3260 time properly taken into account.
3261
3262- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3263 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3264 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3265 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3266
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003267Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003269
3270Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003272
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003273- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3274 is built with libdb3 if available.
3275
3276- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3277
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003278C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003280
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003281- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3282 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3283 PySequence_Size().
3284
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003285- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3286
3287- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3288 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3289 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3290
3291- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3292 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3293
3294- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3295 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003297New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003299
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003300- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3301 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3302
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003303- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3304 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3305
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003306- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3307
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003308Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003310
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003311- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3312 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3313
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003314Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003315-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003316
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003317Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003318----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003319
3320- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3321 removed completely in the next release.
3322
3323- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3324 OSX.
3325
3326- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3327 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3328
3329- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3330
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003331
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003332What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003333===========================
3334
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003335*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3336
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003337Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003338--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003339
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003340- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003341 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003342 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003343 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3344 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003345 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3346 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003347 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3348 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003349
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003350- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3351 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3352
3353- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3354 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3355
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003356Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003358
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003359- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3360 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3361 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3362 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3363 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3364 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3365 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3366 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3367
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003368- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3369 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3370 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3371 example).
3372
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003373- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003374 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003375 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003376 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003377
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003378- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3379 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3380 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003381 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003382
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003383- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3384 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3385 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3386 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3387 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3388 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3389
3390 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3391
3392 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3393
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003394Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003396
3397- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3398
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003399- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3400
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003401- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3402 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003403
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003404- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3405 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3406 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3407 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3408 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3409 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003410 attributes.
3411
3412- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3413 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3414 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003415
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003416- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3417 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3418 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003419
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003420- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3421 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3422 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003423 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3424 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3425
3426- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3427 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003428
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003429Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003431
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003432- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3433 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3434
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003435- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3436 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3437 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3438 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3439
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003440- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3441 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3442 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3443 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3444
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003445 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3446 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3447 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3448 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3449 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3450 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3451 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3452 without losing information).
3453
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003454- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003455 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3456 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3457 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3458 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3459 module).
3460
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003461 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003462 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3463 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3464 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3465 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003466
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003467- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003468 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3469 encoding.
3470
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003471- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3472 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3473
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003474- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003475 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3476
3477- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3478 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3479 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3480 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3481
3482- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3483
3484- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3485 ON, and OFF.
3486
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003487- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3488 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3489
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003490Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003492
3493- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3494 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3495 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003496
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003497- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3498 been added: -X and -E.
3499
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003500Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003501-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003502
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003503- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3504 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3505
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003506C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003508
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003509- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3510 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3511 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3512 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3513 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3514
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003515- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3516 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3517 as long) arguments.
3518
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003519- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3520 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3521 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3522 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3523 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3524 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3525
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003526- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3527 input.
3528
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003529New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003531
3532Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003534
3535Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003537
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003538- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3539 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3540 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3541
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003542- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3543 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3544 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003545 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003546
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003547 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3548 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3549 import signal
3550 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003551
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003553 while 1:
3554 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003556 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3557 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3558 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3559 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003560
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003561
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003562What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3563===========================
3564
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003565*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3566
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003567Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003569
3570- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3571 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3572 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3573
3574- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3575 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3576 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3577 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3578 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3579 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3580 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003581
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003582- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003583 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003584 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3585 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3586 associate a docstring with a property.
3587
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003588- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3589 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3590 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3591 other built-in object types.
3592
3593- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3594 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3595 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3596 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3597 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3598
3599- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3600 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3601
3602- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3603 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003604 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003605 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3606 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3607 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3608 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3609 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3610
3611- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3612 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3613 class.
3614
3615- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3616 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3617 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3618 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3619
3620- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3621 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3622 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3623 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3624
3625- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3626 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3627
3628- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3629 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3630 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3631 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3632 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003633 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003634 with the same value as s.
3635
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003636- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3637
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003638Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003640
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003641- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3642
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003643- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3644 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3645 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3646 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3647 objects.
3648
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003649- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3650 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003651 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3652 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3653
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003654- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3655 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3656 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3657
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003658Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003660
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003661- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3662 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3663 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3664 by the instances.
3665
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003666- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3667 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3668 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3669
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003670- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3671 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3672 before the entire comparison is complete.
3673
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003674- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3675 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3676 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3677
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003678- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3679 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3680 getwriter().
3681
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003682- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3683 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3684
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003685- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003686 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3687 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3688
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003689- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3690 iterable object.
3691
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003692- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3693 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003694
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003695- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3696 authentication.
3697
3698- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3699 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003700
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003701- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003702 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3703 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3704 a sample driver.)
3705
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003706Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003708
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003709- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3710 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3711 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3712 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3713 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3714 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3715 kernel has large file support.
3716
3717- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3718 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3719 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3720 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3721 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3722
3723- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3724 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3725 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3726
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003727C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003729
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003730- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3731 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3732
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003733New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003735
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003736- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3737 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3738
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003739Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003741
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003742- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3743 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3744 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3745 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3746 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3747
3748- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3749 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3750 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3751 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3752
3753- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3754 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3755
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003756Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003758
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003759- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003760 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3761 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003762
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003763
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003764What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3765===========================
3766
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003767*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3768
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003769Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003771
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003772- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3773 big to represent as a C double.
3774
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003775- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3776 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3777 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3778 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3779 restriction).
3780
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003781- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3782 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3783 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3784 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3785 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3786
3787 >>> dir([])
3788 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3789 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3790 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3791 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3792 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3793 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3794 'reverse', 'sort']
3795
3796 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3797
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003798- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003799 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3800 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3801 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3802 OverflowError exception.
3803
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003804- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003805 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003806 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3807 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3808 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3809 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3810 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003811 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3813 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3814
3815 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3816 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3817 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3818 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003819
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003820- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003821 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3822 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3823 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3824 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3825 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3826 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3827 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3828 once it is created.
3829
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003830- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3831 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3832 (key, value) pairs.
3833
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003834- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003835 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3836 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3837
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003838- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3839 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3840 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3841 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3842 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003843
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003844- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003845 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3846 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3847
3848 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3849
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003850- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003851 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3852
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003853Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003855
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003856- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003857 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3858 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003859
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003860- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3861 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3862 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3863 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3864 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3865 in this area anymore).
3866
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003867- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3868 threading.Timer.
3869
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003870- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3871 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3872
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003873- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003874 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3875
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003876- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003877 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3878 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3879 converted to Python longs.
3880
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003881- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003882 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3883
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003884- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3885 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3886 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3887
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003888Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003890
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003891- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3892 division operators as per PEP 238.
3893
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003894Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003896
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003897- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3898 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3899 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3900 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3901
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003902C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003904
3905- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003906
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003907- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3908 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003909 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003910
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3912 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003913 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003915
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003916- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003917 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3918 module:
3919
3920 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003921
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003922 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3923 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003924
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003925 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3926 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003927
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003928 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3929
3930 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3931
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003932- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003933 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3934 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3935 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003936
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003937New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003939
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003940- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3941 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3942 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3943 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3944 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003945
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003946Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003947-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003948
3949Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003951
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003952- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3953 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3954 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3955 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003956 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3957 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3958 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3959 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3960 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003961
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003962- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003963 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3964
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003965
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003966What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3967===========================
3968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3970
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003971Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003973
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003974- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3975 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3976
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003977- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3978 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3979 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003980
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003981- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3982 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3983 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3984 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003985
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003986- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3987
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003989
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003990Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003992
3993- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003994 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003995 the module docstring for details.
3996
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003997Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003999
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004000- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004001 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4002 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4003 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004004
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004005- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4006 Nick Mathewson.
4007
4008Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004010
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004011- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4012 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4013 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4014 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4015 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4016 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4017 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4018 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4019
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004020- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4021 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4022 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4023 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4024
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004025- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4026 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4027 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4028 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4029 come a long way).
4030
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004031- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4032 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4033 write filters for these warnings).
4034
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004035- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4036 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4037 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4038 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4039 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4040
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004041- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4042 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4043 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4044 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4045 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4046 older distribution.
4047
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004048Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004050
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004051- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4052 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004053 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004054
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004055- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4056 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4057 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4058
4059- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4060
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004061- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4062
4063- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4064
4065- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4066
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004068
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004069- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4070
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004071New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004073
4074C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004076
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004077- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4078 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4079 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4080 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4081 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4082 against buffer overruns.
4083
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004084- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004085 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4086 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004087 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4088 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4089 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4090
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004091- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4092 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4093 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4094 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4095 deprecated.
4096
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004097Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004099
4100- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4101 relevant is found.
4102
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004103
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004104What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004105===========================
4106
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4108
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004109Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004111
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004112- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4113 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4114 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4115 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4116 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4117 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4118 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4119 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004120 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004121 repaired.
4122
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004123- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004124 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004125 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4126 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4127 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4128 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4129 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4130 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4131 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4132 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4133
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004134- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4135 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4136 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4137 leading BMO character).
4138
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004139- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4140 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4141 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4142
4143 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4144 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4145 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004146
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004147 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4148 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4149 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4150 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4151 for various simple to use conversions.
4152
4153 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4154 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4155
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4157 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4158 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4159 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4160 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4161 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4162 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4163 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4164 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4165 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4166 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4167 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4168 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4169 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4170 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004171
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004172- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4173 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4174 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004175 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004176 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004177
4178 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004179 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4180 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4181 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4182 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4183 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004184 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4185 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004186
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004187 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4188 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4189 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004190 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004191
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004192- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4193 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4194 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4195 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4196 floating arithmetic,
4197
4198 x = 9007199254740992.0
4199 print long(x)
4200
4201 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4202 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4203 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4204 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4205 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4206 functions are of good quality).
4207
4208 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4209 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4210 algorithms to break.
4211
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004212- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4213 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4214 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4215 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4216 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4217 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4218 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4219 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4220 order.
4221
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004222- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4223 operation along the most common code paths.
4224
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004225- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4226 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4227
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004228- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4229 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4230 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4231 {}.update(UserDict())
4232
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004233- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4234 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4235 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4236 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4237 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4238 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4239 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4240 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4241
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004242- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004243 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004245 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004246 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4247 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004248 join() method of strings
4249 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004250 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4251 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004253 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004254
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004255- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4256 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4257
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004258- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4259 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4260
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004261- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4262 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4263 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4264 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4265
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004266- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4267 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004268 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004269 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4270 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004271
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004272- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4273
4274
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004275Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004277
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004278- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004279 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004280 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4281 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4282
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004283- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4284 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4285
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004286- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4287 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4288 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4289 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4290
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004291- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4292 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4293 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4294
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004295- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4296
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004297- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4298
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004299- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4300 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4301 that are still imported into string.py).
4302
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004303- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4304
4305- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4306 Now it does.
4307
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004308- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4309
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004310- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4311 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4312 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4313 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4314 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004315 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4316 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004317
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004318- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4319 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4320 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4321 'help(object)'.
4322
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004323Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004325
4326- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004327 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004328 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4329 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4330
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004331- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004332 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4333 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004334
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004335C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004336-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004337
4338- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4339 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340
4341----
4342
4343**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**