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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
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000500- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
501 generator objects.
502
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000503- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
504 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000505 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
506 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000507
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000508- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
509 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
510
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000511- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
512 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
513 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
514 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
515 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
516
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000517- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
518 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
519 about 10% faster.
520
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000521- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
522 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
523
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000524- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
525 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
526 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
527 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
528
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000529New platforms
530-------------
531
532Tests
533-----
534
535Windows
536-------
537
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000538- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
539 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
540 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
541 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
542
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000543- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
544 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
545 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
546
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000547Mac
548----
549
550
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000551What's New in Python 2.3 final?
552===============================
553
554*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
555
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000556IDLE
557----
558
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000559- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
560 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
561 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
562 context-menu actions.
563
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000564- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
565 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
566 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
567 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
568 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
569 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
570 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
571 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
572 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
573
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000574
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000575What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
576=============================================
577
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000578*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000579
580Core and builtins
581-----------------
582
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000583- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000584 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000585 comment at the end are still unsupported.
586
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000587Extension modules
588-----------------
589
590- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
591 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
592 than once. This has been fixed.
593
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000594- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
595 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
596 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
597 call.
598
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000599- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
600
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000601Library
602-------
603
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000604- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
605 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
606
607- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
608 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
609 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
610 restored.
611
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000612IDLE
613----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000614
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000615- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000616
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000617Build
618-----
619
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000620- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
621 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
622
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000623C API
624-----
625
626Windows
627-------
628
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000629- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
630 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
631
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000632- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
633
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000634Mac
635---
636
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000637- Various fixes to pimp.
638
639- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
640
641- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
642 more problems than it solves.
643
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000644
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000645What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
646=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000647
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000648*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
649
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000650Core and builtins
651-----------------
652
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000653- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
654 by sys.setcheckinterval().
655
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000656- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
657 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000658 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000659
660- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
661 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
662 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000663 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000664
665- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
666 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000667
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000668- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
669 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
670 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
671
672- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000673 770247.
674
675- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000676
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000677Extension modules
678-----------------
679
680- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
681 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
682
683- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
684
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000685- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
686
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000687- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
688 contained within the _strptime module.
689
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000690- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
691 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
692
693- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000694 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
695
696- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
697 the find_class attribute, if present.
698
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000699- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000700
701 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
702 (SF bug 763298).
703
704 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000705 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
706 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
707 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000708
709 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
710
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000711Library
712-------
713
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000714- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
715
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000716- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
717 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
718 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
719 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
720 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
721 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
722 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
723 or Tester().
724
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000725- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
726 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
727 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
728 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
729 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
730 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
731 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
732 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
733 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000734
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000735 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000736
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000737- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
738 weren't before was an oversight.
739
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000740- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
741 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
742
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000743- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
744 when there are no lines.
745
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000746- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
747 which could occur with Tk 8.4
748
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000749- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
750 to child processes.
751
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000752- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
753
754- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
755
756- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
757 xmlrpclib.
758
759- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
760 responses.
761
762- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
763 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
764
765- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
766 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
767 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
768
769- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
770 used as patterns.
771
772- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
773 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
774 than Tk 8.3.
775
776- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
777
778- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000779
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000780Tools/Demos
781-----------
782
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000783- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
784
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000785- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
786
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000787- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000788
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000789Build
790-----
791
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000792- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
793
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000794- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
795
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000796- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
797 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000798
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000799- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
800 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
801 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000802
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000803C API
804-----
805
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000806- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
807 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
808
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000809Windows
810-------
811
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000812- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
813 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
814 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
815 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
816 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
817 Python exception ::
818
819 thread.error: can't start new thread
820
821 is raised now.
822
823- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
824 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
825 instead of from DLL teardown.
826
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000827Mac
828---
829
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000830- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000831 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000832 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
833 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
834 the executable in the bundle.
835
836- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000837
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000838- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
839
840- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
841 on Panther.
842
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000843What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
844================================
845
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000846*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000847
848Core and builtins
849-----------------
850
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000851- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
852 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
853 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
854 with the -i option.
855
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000856- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
857 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
858
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000859- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
860 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
861
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000862- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
863 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
864 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
865 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
866 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
867 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
868 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
869 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
870 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
871 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
872 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
873 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
874 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000875
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000876- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
877 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
878 embedded in a lambda expression.
879
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000880- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
881 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
882 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
883 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
884 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
885
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000886- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
887 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
888 matches the restriction on classic classes.
889
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000890- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
891 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
892
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000893- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
894 It's writable again.
895
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000896- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
897 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
898 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000899 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000900
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000901- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
902 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
903 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
904
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000905Extension modules
906-----------------
907
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000908- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
909 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
910
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000911- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
912 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
913 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
914 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
915
916- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
917 collection.
918
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000919- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
920 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
921 unique within a single program run.
922
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000923- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
924 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
925
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000926- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
927 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
928
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000929- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
930 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000931
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000932- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
933
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000934- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
935 Fixes SF bug #730685.
936
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000937- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
938 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
939 for many BSD-derived systems.
940
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000941
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000942Library
943-------
944
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000945- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
946 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
947 primary ones:
948
949 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
950 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
951 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
952
953 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
954 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
955 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
956 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
957 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
958 framework features (which doctest lacks).
959
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000960- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
961 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
962 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
963 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
964 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
965 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
966 argument.
967
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000968- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
969 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
970 in the archive.
971
972- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
973 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
974
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000975- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
976 569574).
977
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000978- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
979 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
980 no more.
981
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000982- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
983 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
984 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
985 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
986 code coverage.
987
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000988- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
989 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
990 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000991 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
992 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000993
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000994- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
995 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
996 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000997 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000998
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000999- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1000
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001001- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1002 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1003 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1004 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1005
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001006- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1007 handling.
1008
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001009- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1010 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1011
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001012- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1013 in socket.py.
1014
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001015- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1016
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001017- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1018 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1019 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1020 opener with proxy support.
1021
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001022- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1023
1024- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1025
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001026Tools/Demos
1027-----------
1028
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001029- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1030
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001031- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1032
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001033- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1034 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001035
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001036- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1037 files.
1038
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001039Build
1040-----
1041
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001042- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001043 different root directory.
1044
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001045C API
1046-----
1047
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001048- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1049 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1050 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1051 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1052 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1053 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1054 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1055 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1056 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1057 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1058
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001059- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1060 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1061 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1062 from Python.
1063
1064
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001065New platforms
1066-------------
1067
1068None this time.
1069
1070Tests
1071-----
1072
1073- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1074 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1075
1076Windows
1077-------
1078
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001079- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1080
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001081- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1082 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1083 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1084 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1085 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1086 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1087 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1088 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1089 that's what it's for.
1090
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001091Mac
1092---
1093
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001094- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1095 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1096 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1097 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001098- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1099 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1100- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001101
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001102SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1103------------------------------------
1104
1105430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1106598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1107622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1108661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1109683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1110697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1111713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1112724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1113727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1114729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1115730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1116731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1117732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1118733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1119735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1120740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1121744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1122745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1123747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1124749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1125751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1126753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1127755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1128757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1129760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1130
1131
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001132What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1133================================
1134
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001135*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001136
1137Core and builtins
1138-----------------
1139
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001140- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1141 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1142
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001143- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1144 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1145 and cannot be strings).
1146
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001147- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1148 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1149 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1150 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1151
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001152- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1153 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1154 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1155 Python itself.
1156
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001157- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1158 the referenced object, if it has one.
1159
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001160- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1161 the thread started at
1162 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1163
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001164- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1165 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1166 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1167 placed on a list index.
1168
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001169- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1170 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1171 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1172 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1173
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001174- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1175 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1176 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1177 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1178 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1179 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1180 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1181
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001182- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1183 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1184 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1185 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1186 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1187
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001188- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1189 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001190
1191- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1192 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1193 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1194 #693195.)
1195
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001196- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1197 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001198
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001199- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001200 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001201 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1202 interpreter executions, would fail.
1203
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001204- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001205 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001206 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001207
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001208Extension modules
1209-----------------
1210
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001211- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1212 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1213 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1214 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1215
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001216- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1217 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1218
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001219- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1220 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1221 and Greg Chapman.)
1222
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001223- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1224 recursively.
1225
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001226- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001227 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1228 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1229 leaks.
1230
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001231- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1232
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001233- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1234 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1235 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1236 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1237 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1238 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1239 #705836.
1240
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001241- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001242 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1243
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001244- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1245 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1246 See SF bug #692416.
1247
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001248- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1249 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1250
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001251- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1252 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1253 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001254
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001255- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001256 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1257 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1258
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001259- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1260 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1261 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1262 timeouts to work properly.
1263
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001264Library
1265-------
1266
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001267- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1268 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1269 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1270 future release.
1271
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001272- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1273 for querying platform dependent features.
1274
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001275- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001276
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001277- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1278 pickle protocol versions.
1279
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001280- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1281 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1282 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1283
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001284- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1285
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001286- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1287 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1288 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1289 modules.
1290
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001291- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1292 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1293 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1294
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001295- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1296 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1297
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001298- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1299 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1300 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1301
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001302- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001303 MS Office extensions.
1304
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001305- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1306 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1307
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001308- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1309 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1310
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001311- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1312 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1313 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1314 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1315 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1316 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1317
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001318- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1319 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1320 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001321
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001322- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1323 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1324 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1325
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001326- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1327
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001328- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1329 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1330 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1331
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001332Tools/Demos
1333-----------
1334
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001335- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1336 See the module docstring for details.
1337
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001338Build
1339-----
1340
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001341- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1342 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001343
1344C API
1345-----
1346
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001347- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1348
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001349- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1350 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1351 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1352
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001353- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1354 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001355
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001356 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1357 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1358 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001359
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001360- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001361 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1362
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001363- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1364 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1365 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001366
1367New platforms
1368-------------
1369
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001370None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001371
1372Tests
1373-----
1374
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001375- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1376 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001377
1378Windows
1379-------
1380
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001381- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1382 function.
1383
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001384- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1385 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001386
1387Mac
1388---
1389
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001390- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1391 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001392
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001393- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1394 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001395
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001396- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1397 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1398 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001399
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001400- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001401 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1402 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001403
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001404- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1405 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001406
1407
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001408What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1409=================================
1410
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001411*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001412
1413Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001414-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001415
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001416- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1417 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1418 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1419
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001420- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1421 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1422 (SF patch #664376.)
1423
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001424- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1425 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1426 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1427 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1428 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1429 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001430 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001431
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001432- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1433 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1434 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1435 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001436 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001437
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001438- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1439 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1440 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1441 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1442 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1443 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1444 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1445 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1446 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1447 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1448 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1449
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001450- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1451 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1452 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1453 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1454 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1455 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1456
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001457- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1458 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1459
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001460- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1461 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1462 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1463 case.)
1464
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001465- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1466 passed as unicode strings.
1467
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001468- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1469 See SF bug #683467.
1470
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001471- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1472 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1473
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001474- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1475
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001476- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1477
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001478- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1479 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1480 arguments.
1481
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001482- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1483 See SF bug #667147.
1484
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001485- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001486 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001487 See SF bug #676155.
1488
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001489- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001490 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001491 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1492 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1493 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1494 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1495 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1496 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001497
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001498Extension modules
1499-----------------
1500
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001501- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1502 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1503 tp_as_number pointer.
1504
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001505- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1506 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1507 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1508 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1509 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1510
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001511- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1512
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001513- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1514
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001515- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001516 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001517 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1518 patch #678531.)
1519
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001520- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1521 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1522
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001523- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1524 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1525
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001526- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1527
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001528- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1529 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1530 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1531
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001532- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1533
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001534- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1535 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1536
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001537- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001538
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001539- datetime changes:
1540
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001541 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1542
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001543 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1544 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1545 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1546 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1547 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1548 now.
1549
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001550 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001551 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1552 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001553
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001554 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001555 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001556 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1557 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1558 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1559 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001560
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001561 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1562 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1563 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001564 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1565
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001566 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1567 by a later example coded by Guido.
1568
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001569 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001570 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1571 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1572 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001573 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1574 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1575
1576 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1577 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1578 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1579 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1580 tzinfo subclass instance.
1581
1582 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1583 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1584 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1585 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1586 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1587 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1588 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1589 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001590
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001591 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1592 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1593 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1594 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1595 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001596 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1597
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001598 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001599
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001600 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1601 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1602 as a naive datetime object.
1603
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001604 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1605 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1606 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1607
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001608 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1609 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1610 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1611 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1612 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1613 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1614 comparison.
1615
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001616 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1617 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1618 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1619 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001620 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001621
1622 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001623
1624 and ::
1625
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001626 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1627
1628 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1629 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1630 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1631 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1632
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001633 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1634 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1635 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1636 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1637 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1638
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001639 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1640 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001641 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1642 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001643
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001644Library
1645-------
1646
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001647- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1648 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1649
1650- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1651 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1652 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1653 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1654 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1655 See PEP 307 for details.
1656
1657- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1658 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1659
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001660- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1661 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001662 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001663 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1664 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001665 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001666
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001667- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1668 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1669
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001670- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1671 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1672 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1673
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001674- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1675
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001676- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1677 exception.
1678
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001679- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1680 class.
1681
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001682- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1683 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1684 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1685
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001686- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1687 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1688
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001689- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001690 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1691 See SF bug #659228.
1692
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001693- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1694 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1695 See SF patch #651082.
1696
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001697- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001698
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001699- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1700 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1701
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001702- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001703 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001704
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001705- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1706 DOS paths from other platforms.
1707
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001708Tools/Demos
1709-----------
1710
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001711- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1712 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1713 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1714 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1715 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1716 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1717 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1718 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1719 example:
1720
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001721 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1722 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001723
1724 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1725
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001726
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001727Build
1728-----
1729
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001730- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1731 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1732 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001733 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1734
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001735 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1736
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001737- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1738 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1739 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1740 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1741 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1742 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1743 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1744 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1745 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1746
1747- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1748 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1749 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1750 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1751
1752- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1753 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1754
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001755C API
1756-----
1757
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001758- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1759 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001760
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001761- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1762 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1763 tp_as_number pointer.
1764
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001765- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1766 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1767 (SF #681367)
1768
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001769- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1770 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1771 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1772 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001773
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001774Tests
1775-----
1776
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001777- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001778 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1779 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1780 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1781 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1782 pydoc.)
1783
1784- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1785
1786- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001787
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001788Windows
1789-------
1790
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001791- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1792 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1793 time).
1794
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001795- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1796 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1797
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001798- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1799 release without strong cryptography.
1800
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001801- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001802 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001803
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001804- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1805 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1806
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001807Mac
1808---
1809
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001810- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1811 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001812
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001813- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1814 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1815 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001816
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001817- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1818 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001819
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001820- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1821 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1822 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1823 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001824
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001825- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001826 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1827 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1828 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001829
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001830
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001831What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001832=================================
1833
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001834*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001835
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001836Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001837--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001838
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001839- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1840
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001841- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1842 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001843 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001844 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001845 a different meaning than before.
1846
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001847- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001848 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001849 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001850
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001851- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001852 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001853 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001854
1855- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1856 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1857 and deallocation.
1858
1859- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1860 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1861
1862- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1863 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1864 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1865 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1866 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1867
1868- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1869 now detected by the garbage collector.
1870
1871- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1872 [SF bug 519621]
1873
1874- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1875 identifier.
1876
1877- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1878 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1879 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1880 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1881 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1882 [SF bug 563060]
1883
1884- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1885 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1886 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1887 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1888 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1889
1890- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1891 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1892 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1893
1894- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1895
1896- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1897 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1898 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1899 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1900 state of the slots would be lost.)
1901
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001902Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001903-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001904
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001905- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001906 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1907 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1908 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1909 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001910 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1911 Jython 2.1.
1912
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001913- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001914 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001915 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1916 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1917 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1918 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1919 these, see PEP 302.
1920
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001921- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1922 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1923 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1924
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001925- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1926 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1927 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1928
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001929- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1930 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1931 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1932
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001933- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1934 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1935 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1936 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1937 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1938 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1939 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1940 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1941 releases or implementations.
1942
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001943- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001944 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1945 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001946
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001947- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1948 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1949
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001950- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1951 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1952 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1953
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001954- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1955 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1956
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001957- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1958 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001959 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1960 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001961
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001962- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1963 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1964 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1965 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1966 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1967
1968 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1969 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1970 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1971 pattern.
1972
1973 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1974 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1975 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1976 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1977
1978 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1979 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1980 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1981 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1982 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1983 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1984
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001985- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1986 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1987 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1988 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1989 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1990 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1991 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1992 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001993
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001994- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1995 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1996 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1997 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1998 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001999 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2000 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2001 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2002 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2003 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2004 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2005 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002006
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002007- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2008 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2009
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002010- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2011 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2012 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2013 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2014 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2015 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2016 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2017 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2018 to Zack Weinberg!
2019
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002020- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2021 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2022 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2023 type. This has been fixed now.
2024
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002025- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2026 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2027 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2028
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002029- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2030 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2031 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2032 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2033 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2034 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2035 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2036 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002037 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002038
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002039- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2040 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2041 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002042
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002043- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2044 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2045 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2046 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2047 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2048 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2049 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2050 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002051 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002052 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2053 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2054
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002055- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2056 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2057 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2058 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2059 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2060 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2061 this.)
2062
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002063- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2064 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002065 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002066 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002067 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2068 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002069 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2070 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002071
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002072- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2073 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2074 currently running.
2075
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002076- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2077 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2078 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2079 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2080
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002081- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2082 as directory names.
2083
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002084- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2085 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2086
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002087- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2088 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2089
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002090- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002091 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2092 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002093
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002094- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2095 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2096 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2097 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2098 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2099
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002100- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2101 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2102 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2103 removed.
2104
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002105- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2106 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2107 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2108
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002109- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2110 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2111 to __debug__.
2112
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002113- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2114 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2115 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2116
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002117- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2118 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2119 deprecated now.
2120
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002121- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2122 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2123 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002124
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002125- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2126 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2127 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2128 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2129 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002130
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002131- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2132 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2133
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002134- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2135 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2136 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002137 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002138 is backward compatible.
2139
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002140- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2141 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2142 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2143 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2144 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2145
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002146- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2147 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2148 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2149 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2150 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2151 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002152
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002153- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2154 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2155
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002156- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2157 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2158
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002159- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2160 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2161 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2162 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2163 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2164
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002165- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2166 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2167 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2168
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002169- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002170 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2171
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002172- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2173 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2174 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002175
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002176- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2177 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2178
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002179- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2180 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2181 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2182
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002183- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2184
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002185Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002186-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002187
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002188- Added three operators to the operator module:
2189 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2190 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2191 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2192
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002193- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2194
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002195- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2196 archives.
2197
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002198- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2199 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2200 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2201
2202 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2203
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002204- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2205 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2206 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002207 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002208
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002209- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2210 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2211 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2212 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002213 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2214 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2215 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2216 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002217
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002218- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2219 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002220
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002221- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2222
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002223- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2224 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2225
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002226- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2227 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2228 supported.
2229
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002230- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2231
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002232- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2233 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002234
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002235- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2236 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2237
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002238- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2239
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002240- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2241 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2242
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002243- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2244 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2245 functions but callable type objects.
2246
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002247- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002248 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002249 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002250
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002251- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2252 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002253
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002254- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2255 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002256
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002257- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2258 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2259 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2260 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2261
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002262- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2263 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002264
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002265- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2266 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2267 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2268 and __imul__.
2269
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002270- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002271 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2272 is called.
2273
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002274- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2275 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2276 interpreter was compiled.
2277
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002278- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2279 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2280 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002281 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002282 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2283 1, not 2.
2284
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002285- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2286 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2287 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2288 limit.
2289
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002290- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2291 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2292 bug #623464.
2293
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002294- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2295 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2296 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2297 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2298
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002299Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002300-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002301
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002302- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2303
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002304- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2305 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2306 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2307 with Python 2.3a2.
2308
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002309- os.path exposes getctime.
2310
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002311- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002312 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002313 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002314 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002315 unit tests of floating point results.
2316
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002317- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2318 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2319 has been increased.
2320
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002321- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2322 executed.
2323
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002324- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2325 postinstallation script.
2326
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002327- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2328 test the current module.
2329
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002330- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002331 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2332 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2333 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2334 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2335
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002336- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002337 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002338 Ward's Optik package.
2339
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002340- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2341 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2342 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2343 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2344
2345- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2346 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002347 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002348
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002349- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2350 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2351 shelf are binary pickles.
2352
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002353- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2354 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2355
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002356- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2357 modules are iterators now.
2358
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002359- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2360 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2361 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2362 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2363 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2364 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002365
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002366- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2367 with their entity value.
2368
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002369- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2370
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002371- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2372 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002373
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002374- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2375 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002376 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002377
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002378- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2379 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2380 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2381 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2382 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2383 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2384 main():
2385
2386 import locale
2387 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2388
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002389- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2390 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2391
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002392- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2393 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2394 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2395 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2396 to the new standard.
2397
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002398- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2399 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2400 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2401 an extension to the database.
2402
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002403- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2404 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2405 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2406 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002407 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002408
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002409- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002410 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002411
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002412- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2413 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2414 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2415 bounded integers.
2416
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002417- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2418 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2419 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2420 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2421 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2422 in existence.
2423
2424 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2425 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2426 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2427 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2428 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2429 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2430
2431 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2432 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2433 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2434 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2435
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002436- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2437 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2438 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2439
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002440- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2441
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002442- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2443 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2444 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2445 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2446
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002447- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2448 argument.
2449
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002450- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2451 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2452 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2453 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2454 [SF patch 560794].
2455
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002456- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2457 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2458 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002459 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2460 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2461 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002462
2463- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2464 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002465
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002466- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2467 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2468 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2469 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002470
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002471- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2472 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2473 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2474 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2475 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2476
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002477- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002478
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002479- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2480
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002481- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2482 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2483 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2484 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2485 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2486 identical to None.
2487
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002488- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2489 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2490 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2491 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2492 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2493 results now.
2494
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002495- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2496 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2497
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002498- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2499 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2500 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2501 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2502 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2503 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2504 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2505 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2506
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002507- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2508
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002509- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2510 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2511
2512- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2513 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2514 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2515 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2516 and other systems.
2517
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002518- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2519 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2520 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2521 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 +00002522 work well with these.
2523
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002524- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2525
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002526- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002527 connections.
2528
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002529- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2530 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2531 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2532
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002533- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2534 sets
2535
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002536- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2537 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2538 name.
2539
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002540- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2541 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2542 passed in.
2543
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002544- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002545 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002546 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2547 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002548
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002549- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2550
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002551- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2552
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002553- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2554 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2555 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2556
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002557- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2558 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2559 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2560 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002561 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002562
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002563- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002564 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002565 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002566
2567- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2568 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2569 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2570
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002571- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002572 the value of its expression argument.
2573
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002574- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2575 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2576 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2577
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002578- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2579 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2580 skipstone browser was included.
2581
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002582- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2583 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2584
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002585Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002586-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002587
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002588- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2589 names in addition to accepting file names.
2590
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002591- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2592 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2593 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2594 still used and useful.)
2595
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002596- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2597 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2598 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2599 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002600
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002601- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2602 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2603 the generated binary.
2604
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002605Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002607
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002608- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2609
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002610- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2611 except in the hands of experts.
2612
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002613- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002614 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2615 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2616 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002617
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002618- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2619 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2620 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2621 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2622 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2623 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2624 builds.
2625
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002626- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2627 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2628 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2629 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2630 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2631 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2632 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2633 new type.
2634
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002635- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002636
2637 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2638 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2639 positive infinities.
2640
2641 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2642 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2643 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2644 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2645 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2646 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2647 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2648
2649 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2650
2651 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2652
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002653- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2654 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2655 size of the executable.
2656
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002657- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2658 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2659 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2660 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002661
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002662- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2663
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002664- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2665 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2666 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002667
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002668- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2669 well as Unix.
2670
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002671- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2672 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2673 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2674 modules in the README file for details.
2675
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002676C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002677-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002678
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002679- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2680 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002681 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002682 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002683 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002684
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002685- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2686 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2687 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2688 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2689 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2690 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002691 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002692 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2693 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2694 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2695 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2696 aligned.)
2697
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002698- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2699 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2700 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2701
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002702- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2703 level.
2704
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002705- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2706 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2707 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2708 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2709 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2710
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002711- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2712 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2713 code.
2714
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002715- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2716 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2717 adjusting for negative indices.
2718
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002719- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2720 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2721 object.
2722
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002723- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2724 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2725 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2726
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002727- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2728 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002729
2730- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2731
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002732- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2733 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2734 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2735 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2736
2737- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2738
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002739- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002740
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002741- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002742 without going through the buffer API.
2743
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002744- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002745
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002746- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2747 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2748 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2749 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2750
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002751- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2752 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2753
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002754- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002755 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2756
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002757New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002758-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002759
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002760- OpenVMS is now supported.
2761
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002762- AtheOS is now supported.
2763
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002764- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2765
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002766- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2767
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002768Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002769-----
2770
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002771- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2772 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2773 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002774
2775Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002777
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002778- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2779 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2780 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2781 bugs.
2782 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002783 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002784 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2785 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002786 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002787
2788- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002789 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002790
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002791- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2792 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2793
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002794- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2795 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002796 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002797 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2798
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002799- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2800 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2801 use files" uninstall option).
2802
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002803- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2804
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002805- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2806 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2807
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002808- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2809 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2810 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2811
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002812- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2813 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2814 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2815 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2816 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002817 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2818 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2819 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002820
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002821- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002822 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002823 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2824 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2825 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2826 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2827 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2828 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2829 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2830 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2831 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2832 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2833 work around.
2834
2835- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2836 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2837 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2838 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2839 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2840 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2841 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2842 specified with O_CREAT too).
2843
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002844Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845----
2846
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002847- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002848
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002849- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2850 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2851 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2852
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002853- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2854 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2855 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2856
2857- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2858 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2859 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2860 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2861 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2862 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2863 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2864 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002865
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002866- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2867 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2868 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002869
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002870- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2871 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2872 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2873 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2874 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002875
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002876- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2877 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2878 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002879
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002880- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2881 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002882
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002883- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2884 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2885 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2886 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2887 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002888
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002889- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2890 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2891 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2892
2893- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2894 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2895 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002896
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002897- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2898 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2899 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2900 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002901 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002902
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002903- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2904 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002905
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002906- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2907 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002908
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002909- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002910 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002911 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2912 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002913
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002914
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002915What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002916===============================
2917
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002918*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2919
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002920Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002921--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002922
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002923- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2924 with a custom metaclass.
2925
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002926Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002927-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002928
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002929- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2930 are proxies.
2931
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002932Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002933-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002934
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002935- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2936 very short strings.
2937
2938- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2939 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2940 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2941 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2942 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2943
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002944Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002946
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002947- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2948 close or delete time).
2949
2950- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2951 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2952
2953- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2954
2955- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002956 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002957
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002958Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002959-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002960
2961Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002962-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002963
2964C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002965-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002966
2967New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002968-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002969
2970Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002971-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002972
2973Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002974-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002975
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002976- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2977
2978- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2979 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2980
2981- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2982 deleted at process exit time.
2983
2984- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2985 in backslash.
2986
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002987Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002989
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002990- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2991 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2992 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2993
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002994
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002995What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002996===========================
2997
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2999
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003000Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003002
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003003- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3004 been extensively updated. See
3005
3006 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3007
3008 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3009
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003010- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3011 deleted!
3012
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003013- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3014 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3015 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3016 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3017 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3018
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003019- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3020
3021 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3022 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3023
3024 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3025 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3026 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3027 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3028 supported anyway.
3029
3030 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3031 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3032
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003033- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3034 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3035 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3036 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3037 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003038
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003039- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3040 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3041 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3042
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003043Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003044-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003045
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003046- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3047 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3048 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3049 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3050 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3051 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003052 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3053 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3054 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3055 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003056
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003057- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3058 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3059 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3060
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003061Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003062-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003063
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003064- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3065
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003066Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003067-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003068
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003069- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3070 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3071 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3072 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3073 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3074 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3075
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003076- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3077
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003078- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3079
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003080- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3081
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003082- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3083 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3084 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3085
3086- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3087
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003088Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003090
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003091- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3092 off a search on Google.
3093
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003094Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003095-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003096
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003097- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3098 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3099 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3100 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3101 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3102 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3103 other platforms should do likewise.
3104
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003105- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3106 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3107 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3108
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003109C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003110-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003111
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003112- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3113 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3114 producing key-value pairs.
3115
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003116- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003117 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003118 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3119 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3120 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3121 previously went unchallenged.
3122
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003123New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003125
3126Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003127-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003128
3129Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003130-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003131
3132Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003134
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003135- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3136 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003137
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003138- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3139 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3140 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3141 home.
3142
3143
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003144What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003145===========================
3146
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003147*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3148
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003149Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003151
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003152- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3153 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003154
3155 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003156 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003157
3158 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3159 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003160 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003161 This needs to be documented.
3162
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003163- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3164 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3165
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003166- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3167 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3168 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3169
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003170- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3171 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3172
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003173- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3174 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3175 class forbids it).
3176
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003177- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3178 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3179 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3180
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003181- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3182
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003183Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003185
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003186- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3187 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003188 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003189
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003190- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3191 (like 1 + '').
3192
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003193Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003195
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003196- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3197 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3198 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3199 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003200 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003201 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3202
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003203- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3204 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3205 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3206 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3207
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003208- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3209 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003210 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3211 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3212 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003213
3214- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3215 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003216
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003217- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3218 bytes on its input.
3219
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003220Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003221-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003222
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003223- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003224 convenience function.
3225
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003226- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3227 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3228 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003229 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3230 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3231 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3232 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3233 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3234 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003235
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003236- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3237 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3238 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3239 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3240
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003241- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3242 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3243 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3244
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003245- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3246 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3247 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3248 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3249
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003250- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3251 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003253 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3254 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3255 new -l and -e options.
3256
3257- statcache is now deprecated.
3258
3259- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3260 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003262 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3263 time properly taken into account.
3264
3265- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3266 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3267 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3268 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3269
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003270Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003272
3273Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003275
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003276- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3277 is built with libdb3 if available.
3278
3279- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3280
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003281C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003283
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003284- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3285 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3286 PySequence_Size().
3287
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003288- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3289
3290- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3291 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3292 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3293
3294- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3295 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3296
3297- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3298 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3299
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003300New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003301-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003302
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003303- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3304 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3305
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003306- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3307 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3308
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003309- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3310
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003311Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003313
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003314- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3315 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3316
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003317Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003318-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003319
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003320Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003321----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003322
3323- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3324 removed completely in the next release.
3325
3326- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3327 OSX.
3328
3329- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3330 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3331
3332- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3333
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003334
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003335What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003336===========================
3337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003338*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3339
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003340Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003341--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003342
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003343- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003344 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003345 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003346 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3347 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003348 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3349 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003350 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3351 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003352
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003353- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3354 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3355
3356- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3357 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3358
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003359Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003360-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003361
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003362- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3363 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3364 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3365 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3366 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3367 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3368 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3369 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3370
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003371- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3372 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3373 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3374 example).
3375
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003376- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003377 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003378 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003379 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003380
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003381- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3382 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3383 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003384 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003385
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003386- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3387 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3388 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3389 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3390 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3391 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3392
3393 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3394
3395 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3396
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003397Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003398-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003399
3400- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3401
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003402- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3403
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003404- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3405 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003406
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003407- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3408 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3409 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3410 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3411 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3412 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003413 attributes.
3414
3415- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3416 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3417 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003418
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003419- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3420 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3421 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003422
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003423- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3424 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3425 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003426 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3427 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3428
3429- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3430 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003431
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003432Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003433-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003434
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003435- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3436 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3437
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003438- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3439 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3440 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3441 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3442
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003443- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3444 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3445 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3446 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3447
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003448 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3449 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3450 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3451 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3452 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3453 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3454 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3455 without losing information).
3456
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003457- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003458 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3459 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3460 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3461 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3462 module).
3463
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003464 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003465 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3466 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3467 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3468 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003469
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003470- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003471 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3472 encoding.
3473
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003474- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3475 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3476
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003477- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003478 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3479
3480- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3481 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3482 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3483 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3484
3485- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3486
3487- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3488 ON, and OFF.
3489
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003490- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3491 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3492
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003493Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003495
3496- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3497 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3498 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003499
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003500- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3501 been added: -X and -E.
3502
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003503Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003505
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003506- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3507 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3508
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003509C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003511
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003512- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3513 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3514 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3515 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3516 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3517
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003518- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3519 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3520 as long) arguments.
3521
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003522- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3523 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3524 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3525 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3526 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3527 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3528
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003529- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3530 input.
3531
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003532New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003534
3535Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003537
3538Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003540
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003541- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3542 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3543 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3544
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003545- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3546 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3547 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003548 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003549
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3551 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3552 import signal
3553 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003554
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003556 while 1:
3557 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003559 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3560 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3561 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3562 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003563
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003564
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003565What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3566===========================
3567
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3569
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003570Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003572
3573- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3574 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3575 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3576
3577- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3578 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3579 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3580 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3581 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3582 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3583 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003584
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003585- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003586 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003587 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3588 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3589 associate a docstring with a property.
3590
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003591- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3592 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3593 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3594 other built-in object types.
3595
3596- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3597 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3598 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3599 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3600 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3601
3602- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3603 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3604
3605- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3606 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003607 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003608 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3609 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3610 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3611 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3612 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3613
3614- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3615 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3616 class.
3617
3618- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3619 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3620 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3621 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3622
3623- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3624 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3625 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3626 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3627
3628- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3629 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3630
3631- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3632 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3633 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3634 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3635 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003636 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003637 with the same value as s.
3638
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003639- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3640
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003641Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003643
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003644- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3645
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003646- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3647 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3648 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3649 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3650 objects.
3651
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003652- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3653 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003654 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3655 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3656
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003657- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3658 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3659 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3660
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003661Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003663
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003664- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3665 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3666 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3667 by the instances.
3668
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003669- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3670 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3671 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3672
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003673- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3674 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3675 before the entire comparison is complete.
3676
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003677- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3678 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3679 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3680
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003681- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3682 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3683 getwriter().
3684
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003685- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3686 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3687
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003688- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003689 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3690 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3691
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003692- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3693 iterable object.
3694
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003695- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3696 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003697
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003698- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3699 authentication.
3700
3701- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3702 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003703
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003704- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003705 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3706 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3707 a sample driver.)
3708
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003709Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003711
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003712- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3713 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3714 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3715 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3716 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3717 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3718 kernel has large file support.
3719
3720- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3721 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3722 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3723 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3724 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3725
3726- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3727 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3728 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3729
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003730C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003731-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003732
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003733- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3734 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3735
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003736New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003738
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003739- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3740 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3741
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003742Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003744
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003745- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3746 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3747 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3748 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3749 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3750
3751- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3752 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3753 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3754 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3755
3756- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3757 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3758
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003759Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003761
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003762- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003763 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3764 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003765
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003766
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003767What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3768===========================
3769
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3771
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003772Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003774
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003775- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3776 big to represent as a C double.
3777
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003778- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3779 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3780 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3781 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3782 restriction).
3783
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003784- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3785 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3786 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3787 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3788 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3789
3790 >>> dir([])
3791 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3792 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3793 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3794 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3795 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3796 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3797 'reverse', 'sort']
3798
3799 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3800
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003801- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003802 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3803 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3804 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3805 OverflowError exception.
3806
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003807- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003808 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003809 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3810 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3811 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3812 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3813 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003814 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3816 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3817
3818 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3819 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3820 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3821 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003822
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003823- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003824 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3825 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3826 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3827 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3828 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3829 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3830 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3831 once it is created.
3832
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003833- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3834 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3835 (key, value) pairs.
3836
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003837- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003838 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3839 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3840
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003841- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3842 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3843 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3844 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3845 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003846
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003847- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003848 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3849 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3850
3851 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3852
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003853- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003854 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3855
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003856Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003857-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003858
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003859- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003860 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3861 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003862
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003863- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3864 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3865 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3866 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3867 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3868 in this area anymore).
3869
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003870- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3871 threading.Timer.
3872
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003873- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3874 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3875
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003876- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003877 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3878
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003879- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003880 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3881 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3882 converted to Python longs.
3883
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003884- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003885 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3886
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003887- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3888 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3889 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3890
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003891Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003892-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003893
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003894- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3895 division operators as per PEP 238.
3896
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003897Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003899
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003900- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3901 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3902 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3903 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3904
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003905C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003907
3908- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003909
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003910- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3911 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003912 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003913
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3915 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003916 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003918
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003919- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003920 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3921 module:
3922
3923 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003924
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003925 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3926 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003927
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003928 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3929 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003930
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003931 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3932
3933 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3934
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003935- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003936 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3937 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3938 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003939
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003940New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003942
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003943- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3944 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3945 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3946 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3947 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003948
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003949Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003951
3952Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003954
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003955- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3956 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3957 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3958 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003959 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3960 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3961 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3962 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3963 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003964
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003965- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003966 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3967
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003968
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003969What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3970===========================
3971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3973
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003974Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003976
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003977- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3978 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3979
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003980- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3981 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3982 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003983
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003984- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3985 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3986 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3987 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003988
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003989- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003992
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003993Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003995
3996- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003997 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003998 the module docstring for details.
3999
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004000Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004002
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004003- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004004 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4005 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4006 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004007
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004008- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4009 Nick Mathewson.
4010
4011Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004012----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004013
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004014- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4015 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4016 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4017 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4018 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4019 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4020 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4021 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4022
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004023- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4024 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4025 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4026 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4027
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004028- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4029 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4030 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4031 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4032 come a long way).
4033
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004034- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4035 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4036 write filters for these warnings).
4037
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004038- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4039 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4040 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4041 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4042 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4043
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004044- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4045 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4046 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4047 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4048 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4049 older distribution.
4050
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004051Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004053
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004054- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4055 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004056 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004057
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004058- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4059 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4060 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4061
4062- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4063
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004064- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4065
4066- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4067
4068- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4069
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004071
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004072- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4073
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004074New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004076
4077C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004079
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004080- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4081 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4082 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4083 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4084 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4085 against buffer overruns.
4086
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004087- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004088 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4089 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004090 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4091 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4092 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4093
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004094- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4095 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4096 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4097 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4098 deprecated.
4099
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004100Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004101-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004102
4103- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4104 relevant is found.
4105
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004106
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004107What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004108===========================
4109
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4111
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004112Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004114
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004115- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4116 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4117 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4118 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4119 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4120 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4121 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4122 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004123 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004124 repaired.
4125
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004126- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004127 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004128 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4129 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4130 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4131 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4132 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4133 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4134 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4135 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4136
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004137- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4138 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4139 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4140 leading BMO character).
4141
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004142- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4143 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4144 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4145
4146 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4147 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4148 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004149
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004150 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4151 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4152 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4153 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4154 for various simple to use conversions.
4155
4156 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4157 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4158
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004159 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4160 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4161 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4162 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4163 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4164 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4165 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4166 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4167 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4168 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4169 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4170 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4171 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4172 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4173 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004174
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004175- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4176 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4177 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004178 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004179 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004180
4181 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004182 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4183 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4184 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4185 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4186 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004187 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4188 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004189
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004190 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4191 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4192 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004193 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004194
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004195- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4196 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4197 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4198 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4199 floating arithmetic,
4200
4201 x = 9007199254740992.0
4202 print long(x)
4203
4204 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4205 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4206 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4207 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4208 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4209 functions are of good quality).
4210
4211 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4212 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4213 algorithms to break.
4214
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004215- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4216 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4217 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4218 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4219 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4220 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4221 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4222 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4223 order.
4224
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004225- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4226 operation along the most common code paths.
4227
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004228- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4229 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4230
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004231- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4232 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4233 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4234 {}.update(UserDict())
4235
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004236- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4237 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4238 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4239 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4240 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4241 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4242 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4243 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4244
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004245- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004246 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004248 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004249 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4250 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004251 join() method of strings
4252 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004253 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4254 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004256 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004257
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004258- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4259 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4260
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004261- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4262 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4263
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004264- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4265 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4266 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4267 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4268
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004269- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4270 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004271 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004272 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4273 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004274
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004275- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4276
4277
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004278Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004280
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004281- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004282 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004283 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4284 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4285
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004286- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4287 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4288
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004289- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4290 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4291 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4292 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4293
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004294- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4295 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4296 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4297
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004298- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4299
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004300- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4301
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004302- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4303 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4304 that are still imported into string.py).
4305
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004306- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4307
4308- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4309 Now it does.
4310
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004311- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4312
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004313- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4314 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4315 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4316 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4317 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004318 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4319 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004320
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004321- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4322 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4323 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4324 'help(object)'.
4325
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004326Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004328
4329- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004330 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004331 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4332 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4333
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004334- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004335 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4336 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004337
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004338C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004339-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004340
4341- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4342 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343
4344----
4345
4346**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**