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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000015- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
16 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
17
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000018- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
19 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
20 modified the list.
21
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000022- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
23 functions is now writable.
24
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000025- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
26 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
27 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
28 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
29
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000030- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
31 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
32 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
33 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
34 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000035
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000036- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
37 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
38
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000039Extension modules
40-----------------
41
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000042- Added socket.socketpair().
43
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000044Library
45-------
46
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000047- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
48 to the readline module.
49
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000050- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000051 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
52 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000053
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000054- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
55 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
56 contains symlinks.
57
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000058- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
59 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
60
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000061- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
62 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
63 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
64
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000065- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
66 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
67 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
68 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
69 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
70 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
71 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
72 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
73 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
74 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
75 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
76 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
77 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
78
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000079Tools/Demos
80-----------
81
82Build
83-----
84
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000085- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
86 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
87
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000088- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
89 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
90
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000091C API
92-----
93
94Documentation
95-------------
96
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000097- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +000098symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
99the library reference as well.
100
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000101New platforms
102-------------
103
104Tests
105-----
106
107Windows
108-------
109
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000110- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
111 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
112 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
113 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
114 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
115 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
116 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
117 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
118 the problem.
119
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000120Mac
121---
122
123
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000124What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
125=================================
126
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000127*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000128
129Core and builtins
130-----------------
131
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000132- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
133 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
134 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
135 sensitive code.
136
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000137- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
138 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
139 @staticmethod
140 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000141 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000142
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000143- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
144 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
145 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
146 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
147 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
148 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
149 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
150 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
151 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
152 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
153 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
154
155 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
156 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
157 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
158 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
159 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
160 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
161 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
162
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000163- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
164 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
165
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000166- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000167 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000168
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000169- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000170 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000171 which was missing for no apparent reason.
172
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000173- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000174 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
175 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
176
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000177- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
178 types that support garbage collection.
179
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000180- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
181
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000182- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
183 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
184 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
185 Jython.
186
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000187- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
188
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000189- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
190 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
191
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000192- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
193 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
194 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000195
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000196- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
197 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
198 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
199
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000200Extension modules
201-----------------
202
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000203- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
204
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000205Library
206-------
207
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000208- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
209 TIS-620
210
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000211- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
212 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
213 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
214 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
215 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
216 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
217 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
218 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
219 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
220 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
221
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000222- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
223
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000224- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
225 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
226 same as when the argument is omitted).
227 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
228
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000229- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
230
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000231- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
232 schemes are offered.
233
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000234- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
235
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000236- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
237 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
238 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
239
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000240- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
241
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000242- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
243 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
244
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000245- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
246 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
247 when dummy_threading is being used.
248
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000249- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
250 from a tarfile.
251
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000252- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000253 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000254
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000255- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
256 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
257 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
258 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
259
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000260- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
261 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
262
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000263- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
264 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
265 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
266 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
267 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
268 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
269 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
270 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
271 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
272 by some other method in progress).
273
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000274- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
275 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
276 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000277
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000278- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
279
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000280- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
281 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
282 AM Kuchling.
283
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000284- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
285 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
286 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
287
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000288- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
289 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
290 instead of unsigned.
291
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000292- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000293 no longer part of the public API.
294
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000295- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
296 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
297 string methods of the same name).
298
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000299- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000300 SF patch 945642.
301
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000302- doctest unittest integration improvements:
303
304 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
305
306 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
307 DocTestSuites.
308
309- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
310 that provide thread-local data.
311
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000312- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
313 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
314
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000315- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
316
317- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
318 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
319 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
320
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000321- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
322
323 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
324 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
325 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000326
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000327 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
328 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
329 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
330 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
331
332 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
333 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
334
335 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
336 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
337 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
338 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
339
340 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
341 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
342 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
343 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
344 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
345
346 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
347 wrapping help output.
348
349 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
350 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
351 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000352
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000353C API
354-----
355
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000356- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
357 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
358 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
359 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
360 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
361 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
362 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
363 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
364 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
365 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
366 its visible semantics have not changed.
367
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000368- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
369 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
370
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000371Documentation
372-------------
373
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000374- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000375
376 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000377 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000378
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000379 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000380
381 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
382
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000383- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000384
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000385Tests
386-----
387
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000388- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000389 platforms that use the Makefile.
390
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000391- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
392 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
393 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
394
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000395
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000396What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
397=================================
398
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000399*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000400
401Core and builtins
402-----------------
403
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000404- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
405 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
406 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
407 objects now (one object instead of three).
408
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000409- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
410 Windows DLLs.
411
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000412- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
413 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000414
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000415- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
416 a new .pyc magic.
417
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000418- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
419 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
420 be there.
421
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000422- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
423 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
424 the LC_NUMERIC category.
425
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000426- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
427 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
428 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
429
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000430- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
431
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000432- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
433 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
434 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000435
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000436- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
437 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
438
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000439- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
440
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000441- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000442 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000443
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000444- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
445
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000446- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
447
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000448- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
449 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
450
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000451- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
452 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
453 Fixes bug #858016 .
454
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000455- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
456 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
457 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
458
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000459- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
460 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
461 improves their performance (about 35%).
462
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000463- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
464 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
465 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
466
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000467- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
468 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
469 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
470 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
471
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000472- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
473 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
474 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
475 length is not known).
476
477- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
478 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000479 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
480 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000481 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
482
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000483- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
484 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
485
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000486- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
487 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
488 keyword arguments.
489
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000490- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
491 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
492 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
493
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000494- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
495 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
496 cases.
497
498- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
499 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
500 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
501 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
502 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
503 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
504 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
505 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
506 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
507 a release build.
508
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000509- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
510 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
511
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000512- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000513 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000514
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000515- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
516 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
517 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
518 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
519 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
520 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
521 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
522 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
523 destroyed.
524
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000525- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
526 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
527 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
528 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
529 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
530 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
531 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
532 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
533
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000534- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
535 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
536 character other than a space.
537
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000538- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
539 by the function object or by the method object, the function
540 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
541 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
542 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
543 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
544 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
545 attributes with the same name.
546
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000547- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
548 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
549 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
550 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
551 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
552 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
553 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
554 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
555 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
556 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
557 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
558 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
559 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
560 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000561
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000562- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
563 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
564 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
565 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
566 This has been repaired.
567
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000568- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
569
570- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
571
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000572- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
573 over a sequence.
574
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000575- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000576 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000577
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000578- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
579
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000580- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
581 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
582 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
583 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
584 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
585 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
586 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
587 records with equal keys is unchanged).
588
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000589- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
590 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
591 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
592
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000593- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
594 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
595 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
596 freelist.
597
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000598- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
599 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
600
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000601- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
602 number.
603
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000604- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
605 a TypeError exception.
606
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000607- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
608 820195.
609
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000610- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
611 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
612 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
613
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000614- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000615 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
616 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000617
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000618- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
619 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
620 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
621
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000622- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
623 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000624 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000625
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000626- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000627 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
628 the first call.
629
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000630
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000631Extension modules
632-----------------
633
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000634- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
635 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
636
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000637- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
638 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
639 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
640 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
641 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
642 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
643 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000644
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000645- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
646
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000647- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
648
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000649- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
650 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
651
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000652- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
653 fewer false positives.
654
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000655- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
656 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
657
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000658- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000659 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
660
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000661- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000662 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000663 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
664 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
665 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000666
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000667- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
668 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
669 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
670 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
671
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000672- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
673 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
674 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
675 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
676 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
677 #897625.
678
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000679- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
680 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
681
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000682- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
683 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
684 and pops on either side of the deque.
685
686- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
687 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
688
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000689- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
690 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
691 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
692 other functions that expect a function argument.
693
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000694- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
695
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000696- os.getsid was added.
697
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000698- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
699 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
700 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
701
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000702- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
703
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000704- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
705
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000706- readline.clear_history was added.
707
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000708- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
709
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000710- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
711
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000712- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
713
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000714- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
715
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000716- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
717
718- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
719
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000720- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
721
722- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
723
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000724- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
725 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
726 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
727
728- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
729 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
730 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
731 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
732 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
733 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
734 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
735
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000736- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
737 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
738 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
739 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000740
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000741- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000742 iterators from a single iterable.
743
744- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
745 of raising a TypeError exception.
746
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000747- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
748 as parameter.
749
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000750Library
751-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000752
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000753- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
754 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
755 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000756
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000757- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
758 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
759 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000760
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000761- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000762
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000763- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
764 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000765
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000766- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
767 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
768
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000769- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
770
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000771- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000772 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000773
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000774- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
775 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
776
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000777- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
778
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000779- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
780 on cygwin and mingw32.
781
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000782- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
783
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000784- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
785 module.
786
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000787- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
788 installation scheme for all platforms.
789
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000790- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000791 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000792
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000793- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
794 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
795 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
796
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000797- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
798 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
799 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
800
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000801- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
802
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000803- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
804
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000805- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
806 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
807
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000808- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
809 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
810 type pattern with the same value exists.
811
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000812- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
813 when run from the command prompt).
814
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000815- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
816 not taken into consideration when caching value.
817
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000818- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
819 default sort).
820
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000821- Added global runctx function to profile module
822
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000823- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
824
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000825- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
826
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000827- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
828
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000829- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000830 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
831 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
832 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
833 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
834 accordingly.
835
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000836- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
837 decoding standards.
838
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000839- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
840 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
841 called for all requests.
842
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000843- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
844 they are passed to the compiler.
845
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000846- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
847 indent, width and depth.
848
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000849- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
850 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
851
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000852- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
853 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
854
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000855- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
856
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000857- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
858
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000859- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
860
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000861- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
862 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
863
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000864- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000865 for better performance.
866
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000867- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000868
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000869- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
870 a string).
871
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000872- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
873
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000874- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
875
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000876- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
877
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000878- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
879
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000880- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
881 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
882 list of fieldnames.
883
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000884- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
885 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
886
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000887- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
888
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000889- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
890 empty lists.
891
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000892- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
893 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
894 and shelves.
895
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000896- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
897 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
898
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000899- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000900 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
901 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000902
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000903- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
904 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000905 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000906
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000907- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000908 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
909 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
910
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000911- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
912 and removed in Py2.4.
913
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000914- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
915
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000916- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
917
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000918Tools/Demos
919-----------
920
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000921- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
922 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
923
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000924- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
925
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000926- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
927 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
928 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
929 destination in situations where both files are given.
930
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000931- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
932 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
933 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
934 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
935
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000936- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
937
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000938- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
939 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
940 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
941 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
942 now.
943
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000944- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
945 in effect
946
947- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
948 C-c C-h
949
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000950- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
951 -d option was given.
952
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000953Build
954-----
955
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000956- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
957 build under OS X.
958
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000959- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
960 --enable-profiling.
961
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000962- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
963 is configured --with-tsc.
964
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000965- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
966 on AMD64.
967
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000968- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
969 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
970
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000971- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
972 removed.
973
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000974- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
975 supported (see PEP 11).
976
977- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
978
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000979- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
980
981- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
982 (see PEP 11).
983
984- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
985 sizeof(char) must be 1.
986
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000987C API
988-----
989
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000990- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
991 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
992 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
993
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000994- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
995 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
996 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
997 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
998
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000999- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1000 generator objects.
1001
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001002- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1003 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001004 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1005 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001006
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001007- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1008 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1009
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001010- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1011 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1012 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1013 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1014 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1015
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001016- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1017 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1018 about 10% faster.
1019
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001020- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1021 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1022
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001023- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1024 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1025 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1026 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1027
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001028Windows
1029-------
1030
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001031- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1032 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1033 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1034 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1035
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001036- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1037 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1038 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1039
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001040
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001041What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1042===============================
1043
1044*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1045
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001046IDLE
1047----
1048
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001049- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1050 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1051 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1052 context-menu actions.
1053
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001054- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1055 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1056 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1057 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1058 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1059 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1060 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1061 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1062 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1063
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001064
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001065What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1066=============================================
1067
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001068*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001069
1070Core and builtins
1071-----------------
1072
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001073- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001074 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001075 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1076
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001077Extension modules
1078-----------------
1079
1080- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1081 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1082 than once. This has been fixed.
1083
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001084- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1085 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1086 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1087 call.
1088
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001089- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1090
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001091Library
1092-------
1093
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001094- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1095 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1096
1097- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1098 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1099 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1100 restored.
1101
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001102IDLE
1103----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001104
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001105- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001106
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001107Build
1108-----
1109
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001110- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1111 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1112
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001113C API
1114-----
1115
1116Windows
1117-------
1118
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001119- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1120 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1121
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001122- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1123
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001124Mac
1125---
1126
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001127- Various fixes to pimp.
1128
1129- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1130
1131- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1132 more problems than it solves.
1133
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001134
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001135What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1136=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001137
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001138*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1139
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001140Core and builtins
1141-----------------
1142
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001143- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1144 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1145
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001146- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1147 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001148 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001149
1150- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1151 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1152 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001153 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001154
1155- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1156 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001157
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001158- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1159 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1160 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1161
1162- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001163 770247.
1164
1165- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001166
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001167Extension modules
1168-----------------
1169
1170- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1171 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1172
1173- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1174
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001175- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1176
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001177- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1178 contained within the _strptime module.
1179
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001180- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1181 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1182
1183- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001184 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1185
1186- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1187 the find_class attribute, if present.
1188
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001189- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001190
1191 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1192 (SF bug 763298).
1193
1194 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001195 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1196 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1197 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001198
1199 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1200
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001201Library
1202-------
1203
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001204- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1205
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001206- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1207 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1208 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1209 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1210 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1211 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1212 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1213 or Tester().
1214
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001215- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1216 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1217 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1218 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1219 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1220 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1221 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1222 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1223 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001224
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001225 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001226
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001227- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1228 weren't before was an oversight.
1229
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001230- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1231 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1232
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001233- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1234 when there are no lines.
1235
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001236- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1237 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1238
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001239- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1240 to child processes.
1241
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001242- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1243
1244- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1245
1246- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1247 xmlrpclib.
1248
1249- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1250 responses.
1251
1252- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1253 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1254
1255- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1256 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1257 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1258
1259- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1260 used as patterns.
1261
1262- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1263 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1264 than Tk 8.3.
1265
1266- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1267
1268- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001269
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001270Tools/Demos
1271-----------
1272
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001273- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1274
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001275- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1276
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001277- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001278
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001279Build
1280-----
1281
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001282- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1283
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001284- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1285
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001286- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1287 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001288
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001289- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1290 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1291 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001292
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001293C API
1294-----
1295
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001296- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1297 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1298
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001299Windows
1300-------
1301
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001302- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1303 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1304 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1305 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1306 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1307 Python exception ::
1308
1309 thread.error: can't start new thread
1310
1311 is raised now.
1312
1313- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1314 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1315 instead of from DLL teardown.
1316
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001317Mac
1318---
1319
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001320- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001321 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001322 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1323 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1324 the executable in the bundle.
1325
1326- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001327
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001328- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1329
1330- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1331 on Panther.
1332
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001333What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1334================================
1335
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001336*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001337
1338Core and builtins
1339-----------------
1340
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001341- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1342 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1343 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1344 with the -i option.
1345
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001346- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1347 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1348
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001349- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1350 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1351
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001352- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1353 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1354 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1355 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1356 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1357 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1358 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1359 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1360 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1361 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1362 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1363 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1364 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001365
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001366- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1367 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1368 embedded in a lambda expression.
1369
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001370- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1371 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1372 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1373 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1374 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1375
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001376- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1377 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1378 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1379
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001380- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1381 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1382
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001383- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1384 It's writable again.
1385
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001386- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1387 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1388 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001389 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001390
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001391- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1392 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1393 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1394
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001395Extension modules
1396-----------------
1397
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001398- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1399 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1400
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001401- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1402 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1403 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1404 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1405
1406- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1407 collection.
1408
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001409- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1410 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1411 unique within a single program run.
1412
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001413- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1414 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1415
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001416- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1417 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1418
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001419- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1420 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001421
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001422- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1423
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001424- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1425 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1426
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001427- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1428 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1429 for many BSD-derived systems.
1430
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001431
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001432Library
1433-------
1434
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001435- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1436 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1437 primary ones:
1438
1439 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1440 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1441 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1442
1443 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1444 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1445 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1446 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1447 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1448 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1449
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001450- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1451 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1452 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1453 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1454 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1455 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1456 argument.
1457
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001458- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1459 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1460 in the archive.
1461
1462- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1463 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1464
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001465- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1466 569574).
1467
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001468- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1469 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1470 no more.
1471
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001472- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1473 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1474 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1475 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1476 code coverage.
1477
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001478- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1479 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1480 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001481 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1482 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001483
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001484- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1485 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1486 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001487 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001488
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001489- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1490
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001491- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1492 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1493 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1494 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1495
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001496- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1497 handling.
1498
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001499- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1500 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1501
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001502- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1503 in socket.py.
1504
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001505- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1506
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001507- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1508 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1509 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1510 opener with proxy support.
1511
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001512- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1513
1514- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1515
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001516Tools/Demos
1517-----------
1518
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001519- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1520
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001521- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1522
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001523- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1524 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001525
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001526- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1527 files.
1528
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001529Build
1530-----
1531
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001532- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001533 different root directory.
1534
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001535C API
1536-----
1537
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001538- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1539 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1540 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1541 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1542 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1543 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1544 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1545 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1546 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1547 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1548
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001549- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1550 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1551 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1552 from Python.
1553
1554
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001555New platforms
1556-------------
1557
1558None this time.
1559
1560Tests
1561-----
1562
1563- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1564 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1565
1566Windows
1567-------
1568
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001569- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1570
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001571- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1572 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1573 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1574 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1575 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1576 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1577 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1578 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1579 that's what it's for.
1580
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001581Mac
1582---
1583
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001584- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1585 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1586 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1587 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001588- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1589 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1590- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001591
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001592SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1593------------------------------------
1594
1595430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1596598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1597622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1598661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1599683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1600697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1601713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1602724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1603727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1604729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1605730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1606731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1607732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1608733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1609735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1610740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1611744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1612745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1613747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1614749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1615751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1616753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1617755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1618757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1619760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1620
1621
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001622What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1623================================
1624
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001625*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001626
1627Core and builtins
1628-----------------
1629
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001630- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1631 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1632
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001633- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1634 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1635 and cannot be strings).
1636
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001637- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1638 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1639 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1640 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1641
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001642- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1643 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1644 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1645 Python itself.
1646
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001647- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1648 the referenced object, if it has one.
1649
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001650- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1651 the thread started at
1652 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1653
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001654- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1655 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1656 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1657 placed on a list index.
1658
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001659- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1660 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1661 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1662 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1663
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001664- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1665 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1666 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1667 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1668 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1669 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1670 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1671
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001672- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1673 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1674 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1675 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1676 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1677
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001678- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1679 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001680
1681- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1682 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1683 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1684 #693195.)
1685
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001686- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1687 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001688
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001689- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001690 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001691 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1692 interpreter executions, would fail.
1693
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001694- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001695 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001696 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001697
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001698Extension modules
1699-----------------
1700
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001701- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1702 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1703 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1704 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1705
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001706- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1707 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1708
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001709- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1710 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1711 and Greg Chapman.)
1712
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001713- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1714 recursively.
1715
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001716- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001717 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1718 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1719 leaks.
1720
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001721- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1722
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001723- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1724 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1725 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1726 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1727 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1728 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1729 #705836.
1730
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001731- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001732 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1733
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001734- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1735 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1736 See SF bug #692416.
1737
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001738- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1739 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1740
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001741- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1742 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1743 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001744
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001745- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001746 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1747 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1748
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001749- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1750 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1751 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1752 timeouts to work properly.
1753
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001754Library
1755-------
1756
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001757- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1758 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1759 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1760 future release.
1761
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001762- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1763 for querying platform dependent features.
1764
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001765- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001766
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001767- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1768 pickle protocol versions.
1769
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001770- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1771 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1772 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1773
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001774- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1775
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001776- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1777 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1778 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1779 modules.
1780
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001781- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1782 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1783 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1784
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001785- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1786 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1787
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001788- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1789 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1790 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1791
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001792- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001793 MS Office extensions.
1794
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001795- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1796 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1797
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001798- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1799 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1800
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001801- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1802 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1803 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1804 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1805 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1806 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1807
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001808- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1809 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1810 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001811
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001812- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1813 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1814 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1815
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001816- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1817
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001818- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1819 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1820 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1821
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001822Tools/Demos
1823-----------
1824
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001825- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1826 See the module docstring for details.
1827
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001828Build
1829-----
1830
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001831- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1832 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001833
1834C API
1835-----
1836
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001837- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1838
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001839- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1840 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1841 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1842
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001843- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1844 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001845
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001846 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1847 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1848 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001849
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001850- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001851 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1852
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001853- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1854 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1855 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001856
1857New platforms
1858-------------
1859
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001860None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001861
1862Tests
1863-----
1864
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001865- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1866 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001867
1868Windows
1869-------
1870
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001871- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1872 function.
1873
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001874- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1875 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001876
1877Mac
1878---
1879
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001880- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1881 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001882
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001883- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1884 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001885
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001886- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1887 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1888 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001889
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001890- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001891 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1892 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001893
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001894- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1895 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001896
1897
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001898What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1899=================================
1900
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001901*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001902
1903Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001904-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001905
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001906- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1907 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1908 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1909
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001910- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1911 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1912 (SF patch #664376.)
1913
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001914- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1915 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1916 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1917 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1918 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1919 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001920 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001921
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001922- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1923 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1924 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1925 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001926 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001927
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001928- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1929 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1930 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1931 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1932 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1933 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1934 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1935 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1936 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1937 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1938 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1939
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001940- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1941 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1942 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1943 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1944 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1945 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1946
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001947- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1948 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1949
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001950- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1951 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1952 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1953 case.)
1954
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001955- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1956 passed as unicode strings.
1957
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001958- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1959 See SF bug #683467.
1960
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001961- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1962 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1963
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001964- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1965
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001966- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1967
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001968- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1969 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1970 arguments.
1971
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001972- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1973 See SF bug #667147.
1974
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001975- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001976 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001977 See SF bug #676155.
1978
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001979- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001980 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001981 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1982 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1983 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1984 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1985 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1986 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001987
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001988Extension modules
1989-----------------
1990
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001991- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1992 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1993 tp_as_number pointer.
1994
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001995- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1996 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1997 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1998 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1999 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2000
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002001- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2002
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002003- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2004
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002005- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002006 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002007 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2008 patch #678531.)
2009
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002010- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2011 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2012
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002013- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2014 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2015
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002016- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2017
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002018- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2019 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2020 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2021
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002022- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2023
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002024- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2025 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2026
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002027- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002028
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002029- datetime changes:
2030
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002031 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2032
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002033 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2034 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2035 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2036 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2037 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2038 now.
2039
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002040 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002041 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2042 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002043
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002044 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002045 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002046 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2047 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2048 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2049 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002050
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002051 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2052 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2053 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002054 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2055
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002056 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2057 by a later example coded by Guido.
2058
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002059 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002060 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2061 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2062 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002063 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2064 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2065
2066 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2067 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2068 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2069 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2070 tzinfo subclass instance.
2071
2072 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2073 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2074 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2075 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2076 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2077 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2078 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2079 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002080
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002081 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2082 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2083 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2084 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2085 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002086 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2087
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002088 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002089
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002090 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2091 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2092 as a naive datetime object.
2093
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002094 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2095 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2096 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2097
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002098 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2099 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2100 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2101 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2102 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2103 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2104 comparison.
2105
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002106 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2107 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2108 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2109 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002110 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002111
2112 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002113
2114 and ::
2115
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002116 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2117
2118 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2119 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2120 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2121 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2122
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002123 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2124 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2125 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2126 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2127 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2128
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002129 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2130 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002131 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2132 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002133
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002134Library
2135-------
2136
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002137- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2138 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2139
2140- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2141 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2142 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2143 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2144 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2145 See PEP 307 for details.
2146
2147- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2148 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2149
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002150- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2151 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002152 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002153 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2154 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002155 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002156
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002157- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2158 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2159
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002160- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2161 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2162 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2163
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002164- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2165
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002166- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2167 exception.
2168
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002169- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2170 class.
2171
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002172- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2173 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2174 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2175
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002176- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2177 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2178
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002179- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002180 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2181 See SF bug #659228.
2182
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002183- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2184 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2185 See SF patch #651082.
2186
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002187- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002188
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002189- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2190 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2191
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002192- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002193 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002194
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002195- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2196 DOS paths from other platforms.
2197
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002198Tools/Demos
2199-----------
2200
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002201- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2202 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2203 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2204 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2205 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2206 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2207 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2208 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2209 example:
2210
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002211 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2212 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002213
2214 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2215
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002216
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002217Build
2218-----
2219
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002220- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2221 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2222 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002223 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2224
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002225 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2226
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002227- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2228 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2229 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2230 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2231 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2232 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2233 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2234 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2235 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2236
2237- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2238 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2239 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2240 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2241
2242- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2243 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2244
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002245C API
2246-----
2247
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002248- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2249 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002250
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002251- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2252 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2253 tp_as_number pointer.
2254
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002255- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2256 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2257 (SF #681367)
2258
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002259- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2260 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2261 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2262 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002263
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002264Tests
2265-----
2266
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002267- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002268 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2269 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2270 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2271 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2272 pydoc.)
2273
2274- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2275
2276- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002277
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002278Windows
2279-------
2280
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002281- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2282 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2283 time).
2284
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002285- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2286 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2287
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002288- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2289 release without strong cryptography.
2290
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002291- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002292 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002293
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002294- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2295 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2296
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002297Mac
2298---
2299
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002300- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2301 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002302
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002303- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2304 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2305 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002306
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002307- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2308 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002309
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002310- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2311 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2312 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2313 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002314
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002315- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002316 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2317 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2318 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002319
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002320
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002321What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002322=================================
2323
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002324*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002326Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002327--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002328
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002329- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2330
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002331- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2332 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002333 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002334 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002335 a different meaning than before.
2336
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002337- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002338 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002339 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002340
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002341- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002342 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002343 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002344
2345- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2346 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2347 and deallocation.
2348
2349- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2350 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2351
2352- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2353 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2354 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2355 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2356 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2357
2358- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2359 now detected by the garbage collector.
2360
2361- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2362 [SF bug 519621]
2363
2364- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2365 identifier.
2366
2367- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2368 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2369 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2370 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2371 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2372 [SF bug 563060]
2373
2374- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2375 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2376 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2377 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2378 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2379
2380- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2381 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2382 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2383
2384- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2385
2386- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2387 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2388 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2389 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2390 state of the slots would be lost.)
2391
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002392Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002393-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002394
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002395- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002396 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2397 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2398 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2399 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002400 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2401 Jython 2.1.
2402
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002403- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002404 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002405 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2406 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2407 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2408 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2409 these, see PEP 302.
2410
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002411- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2412 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2413 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2414
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002415- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2416 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2417 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2418
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002419- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2420 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2421 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2422
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002423- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2424 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2425 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2426 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2427 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2428 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2429 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2430 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2431 releases or implementations.
2432
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002433- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002434 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2435 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002436
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002437- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2438 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2439
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002440- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2441 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2442 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2443
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002444- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2445 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2446
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002447- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2448 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002449 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2450 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002451
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002452- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2453 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2454 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2455 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2456 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2457
2458 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2459 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2460 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2461 pattern.
2462
2463 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2464 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2465 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2466 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2467
2468 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2469 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2470 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2471 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2472 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2473 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2474
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002475- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2476 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2477 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2478 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2479 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2480 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2481 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2482 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002483
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002484- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2485 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2486 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2487 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2488 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002489 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2490 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2491 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2492 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2493 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2494 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2495 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002496
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002497- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2498 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2499
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002500- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2501 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2502 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2503 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2504 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2505 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2506 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2507 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2508 to Zack Weinberg!
2509
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002510- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2511 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2512 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2513 type. This has been fixed now.
2514
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002515- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2516 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2517 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2518
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002519- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2520 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2521 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2522 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2523 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2524 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2525 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2526 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002527 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002528
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002529- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2530 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2531 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002532
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002533- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2534 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2535 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2536 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2537 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2538 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2539 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2540 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002541 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002542 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2543 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2544
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002545- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2546 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2547 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2548 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2549 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2550 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2551 this.)
2552
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002553- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2554 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002555 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002556 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002557 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2558 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002559 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2560 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002561
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002562- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2563 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2564 currently running.
2565
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002566- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2567 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2568 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2569 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2570
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002571- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2572 as directory names.
2573
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002574- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2575 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2576
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002577- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2578 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2579
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002580- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002581 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2582 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002583
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002584- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2585 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2586 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2587 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2588 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2589
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002590- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2591 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2592 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2593 removed.
2594
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002595- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2596 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2597 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2598
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002599- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2600 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2601 to __debug__.
2602
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002603- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2604 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2605 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2606
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002607- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2608 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2609 deprecated now.
2610
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002611- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2612 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2613 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002614
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002615- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2616 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2617 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2618 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2619 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002620
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002621- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2622 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2623
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002624- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2625 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2626 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002627 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002628 is backward compatible.
2629
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002630- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2631 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2632 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2633 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2634 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2635
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002636- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2637 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2638 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2639 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2640 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2641 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002642
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002643- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2644 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2645
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002646- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2647 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2648
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002649- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2650 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2651 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2652 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2653 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2654
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002655- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2656 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2657 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2658
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002659- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002660 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2661
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002662- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2663 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2664 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002665
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002666- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2667 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2668
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002669- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2670 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2671 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2672
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002673- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2674
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002675Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002676-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002677
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002678- Added three operators to the operator module:
2679 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2680 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2681 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2682
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002683- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2684
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002685- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2686 archives.
2687
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002688- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2689 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2690 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2691
2692 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2693
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002694- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2695 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2696 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002697 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002698
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002699- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2700 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2701 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2702 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002703 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2704 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2705 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2706 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002707
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002708- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2709 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002710
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002711- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2712
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002713- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2714 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2715
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002716- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2717 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2718 supported.
2719
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002720- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2721
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002722- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2723 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002724
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002725- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2726 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2727
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002728- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2729
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002730- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2731 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2732
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002733- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2734 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2735 functions but callable type objects.
2736
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002737- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002738 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002739 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002740
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002741- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2742 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002743
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002744- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2745 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002746
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002747- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2748 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2749 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2750 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2751
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002752- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2753 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002754
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002755- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2756 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2757 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2758 and __imul__.
2759
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002760- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002761 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2762 is called.
2763
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002764- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2765 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2766 interpreter was compiled.
2767
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002768- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2769 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2770 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002771 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002772 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2773 1, not 2.
2774
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002775- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2776 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2777 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2778 limit.
2779
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002780- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2781 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2782 bug #623464.
2783
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002784- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2785 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2786 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2787 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2788
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002789Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002790-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002791
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002792- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2793
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002794- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2795 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2796 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2797 with Python 2.3a2.
2798
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002799- os.path exposes getctime.
2800
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002801- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002802 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002803 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002804 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002805 unit tests of floating point results.
2806
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002807- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2808 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2809 has been increased.
2810
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002811- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2812 executed.
2813
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002814- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2815 postinstallation script.
2816
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002817- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2818 test the current module.
2819
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002820- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002821 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2822 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2823 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2824 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2825
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002826- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002827 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002828 Ward's Optik package.
2829
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002830- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2831 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2832 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2833 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2834
2835- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2836 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002837 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002838
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002839- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2840 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2841 shelf are binary pickles.
2842
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002843- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2844 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2845
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002846- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2847 modules are iterators now.
2848
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002849- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2850 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2851 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2852 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2853 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2854 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002855
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002856- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2857 with their entity value.
2858
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002859- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2860
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002861- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2862 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002863
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002864- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2865 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002866 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002867
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002868- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2869 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2870 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2871 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2872 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2873 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2874 main():
2875
2876 import locale
2877 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2878
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002879- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2880 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2881
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002882- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2883 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2884 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2885 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2886 to the new standard.
2887
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002888- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2889 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2890 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2891 an extension to the database.
2892
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002893- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2894 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2895 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2896 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002897 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002898
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002899- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002900 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002901
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002902- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2903 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2904 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2905 bounded integers.
2906
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002907- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2908 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2909 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2910 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2911 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2912 in existence.
2913
2914 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2915 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2916 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2917 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2918 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2919 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2920
2921 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2922 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2923 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2924 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2925
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002926- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2927 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2928 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2929
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002930- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2931
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002932- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2933 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2934 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2935 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2936
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002937- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2938 argument.
2939
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002940- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2941 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2942 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2943 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2944 [SF patch 560794].
2945
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002946- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2947 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2948 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002949 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2950 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2951 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002952
2953- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2954 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002955
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002956- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2957 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2958 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2959 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002960
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002961- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2962 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2963 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2964 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2965 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2966
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002967- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002968
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002969- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2970
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002971- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2972 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2973 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2974 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2975 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2976 identical to None.
2977
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002978- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2979 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2980 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2981 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2982 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2983 results now.
2984
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002985- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2986 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2987
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002988- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2989 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2990 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2991 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2992 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2993 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2994 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2995 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2996
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002997- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2998
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002999- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3000 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3001
3002- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3003 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3004 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3005 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3006 and other systems.
3007
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003008- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3009 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3010 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3011 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 +00003012 work well with these.
3013
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003014- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3015
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003016- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003017 connections.
3018
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003019- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3020 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3021 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3022
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003023- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3024 sets
3025
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003026- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3027 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3028 name.
3029
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003030- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3031 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3032 passed in.
3033
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003034- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003035 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003036 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3037 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003038
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003039- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3040
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003041- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3042
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003043- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3044 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3045 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3046
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003047- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3048 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3049 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3050 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003051 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003052
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003053- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003054 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003055 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003056
3057- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3058 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3059 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3060
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003061- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003062 the value of its expression argument.
3063
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003064- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3065 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3066 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3067
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003068- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3069 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3070 skipstone browser was included.
3071
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003072- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3073 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3074
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003075Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003076-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003077
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003078- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3079 names in addition to accepting file names.
3080
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003081- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3082 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3083 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3084 still used and useful.)
3085
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003086- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3087 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3088 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3089 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003090
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003091- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3092 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3093 the generated binary.
3094
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003095Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003096-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003097
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003098- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3099
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003100- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3101 except in the hands of experts.
3102
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003103- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003104 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3105 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3106 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003107
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003108- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3109 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3110 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3111 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3112 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3113 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3114 builds.
3115
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003116- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3117 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3118 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3119 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3120 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3121 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3122 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3123 new type.
3124
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003125- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003126
3127 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3128 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3129 positive infinities.
3130
3131 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3132 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3133 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3134 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3135 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3136 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3137 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3138
3139 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3140
3141 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3142
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003143- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3144 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3145 size of the executable.
3146
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003147- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3148 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3149 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3150 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003151
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003152- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3153
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003154- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3155 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3156 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003157
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003158- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3159 well as Unix.
3160
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003161- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3162 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3163 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3164 modules in the README file for details.
3165
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003166C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003168
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003169- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3170 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003171 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003172 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003173 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003174
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003175- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3176 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3177 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3178 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3179 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3180 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003181 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003182 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3183 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3184 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3185 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3186 aligned.)
3187
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003188- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3189 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3190 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3191
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003192- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3193 level.
3194
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003195- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3196 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3197 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3198 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3199 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3200
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003201- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3202 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3203 code.
3204
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003205- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3206 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3207 adjusting for negative indices.
3208
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003209- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3210 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3211 object.
3212
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003213- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3214 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3215 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3216
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003217- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3218 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003219
3220- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3221
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003222- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3223 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3224 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3225 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3226
3227- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3228
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003229- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003230
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003231- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003232 without going through the buffer API.
3233
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003235
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003236- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3237 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3238 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3239 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3240
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003241- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3242 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3243
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003244- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003245 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3246
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003247New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003248-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003249
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003250- OpenVMS is now supported.
3251
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003252- AtheOS is now supported.
3253
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003254- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3255
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003256- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3257
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003258Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003259-----
3260
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003261- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3262 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3263 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003264
3265Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003267
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003268- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3269 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3270 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3271 bugs.
3272 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003273 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003274 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3275 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003276 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003277
3278- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003279 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003280
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003281- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3282 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3283
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003284- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3285 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003286 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003287 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3288
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003289- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3290 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3291 use files" uninstall option).
3292
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003293- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3294
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003295- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3296 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3297
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003298- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3299 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3300 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3301
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003302- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3303 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3304 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3305 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3306 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003307 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3308 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3309 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003310
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003311- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003312 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003313 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3314 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3315 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3316 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3317 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3318 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3319 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3320 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3321 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3322 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3323 work around.
3324
3325- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3326 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3327 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3328 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3329 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3330 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3331 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3332 specified with O_CREAT too).
3333
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003334Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003335----
3336
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003337- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003338
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003339- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3340 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3341 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3342
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003343- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3344 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3345 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3346
3347- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3348 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3349 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3350 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3351 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3352 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3353 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3354 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003355
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003356- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3357 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3358 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003359
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003360- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3361 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3362 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3363 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3364 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003365
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003366- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3367 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3368 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003369
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003370- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3371 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003372
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003373- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3374 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3375 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3376 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3377 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003378
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003379- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3380 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3381 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3382
3383- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3384 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3385 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003386
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003387- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3388 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3389 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3390 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003391 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003392
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003393- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3394 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003395
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003396- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3397 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003398
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003399- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003400 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003401 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3402 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003403
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003404
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003405What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003406===============================
3407
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003408*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3409
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003410Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003411--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003412
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003413- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3414 with a custom metaclass.
3415
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003416Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003418
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003419- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3420 are proxies.
3421
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003422Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003423-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003424
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003425- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3426 very short strings.
3427
3428- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3429 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3430 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3431 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3432 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3433
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003434Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003436
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003437- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3438 close or delete time).
3439
3440- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3441 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3442
3443- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3444
3445- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003446 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003447
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003448Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003450
3451Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003453
3454C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003456
3457New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003458-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003459
3460Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003462
3463Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003465
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003466- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3467
3468- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3469 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3470
3471- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3472 deleted at process exit time.
3473
3474- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3475 in backslash.
3476
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003477Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003479
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003480- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3481 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3482 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3483
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003484
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003485What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003486===========================
3487
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3489
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003490Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003492
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003493- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3494 been extensively updated. See
3495
3496 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3497
3498 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3499
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003500- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3501 deleted!
3502
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003503- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3504 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3505 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3506 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3507 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3508
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003509- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3510
3511 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3512 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3513
3514 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3515 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3516 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3517 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3518 supported anyway.
3519
3520 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3521 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3522
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003523- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3524 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3525 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3526 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3527 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003528
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003529- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3530 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3531 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3532
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003533Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003535
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003536- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3537 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3538 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3539 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3540 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3541 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003542 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3543 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3544 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3545 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003546
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003547- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3548 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3549 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3550
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003551Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003553
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003554- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3555
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003556Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003557-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003558
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003559- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3560 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3561 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3562 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3563 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3564 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3565
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003566- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3567
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003568- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3569
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003570- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3571
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003572- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3573 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3574 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3575
3576- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3577
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003578Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003580
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003581- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3582 off a search on Google.
3583
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003584Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003586
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003587- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3588 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3589 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3590 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3591 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3592 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3593 other platforms should do likewise.
3594
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003595- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3596 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3597 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3598
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003599C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003601
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003602- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3603 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3604 producing key-value pairs.
3605
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003606- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003607 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003608 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3609 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3610 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3611 previously went unchallenged.
3612
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003613New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003615
3616Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003617-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003618
3619Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003621
3622Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003624
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003625- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3626 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003627
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003628- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3629 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3630 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3631 home.
3632
3633
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003634What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003635===========================
3636
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003637*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3638
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003639Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003640--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003641
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003642- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3643 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003644
3645 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003646 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003647
3648 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3649 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003650 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003651 This needs to be documented.
3652
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003653- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3654 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3655
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003656- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3657 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3658 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3659
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003660- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3661 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3662
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003663- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3664 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3665 class forbids it).
3666
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003667- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3668 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3669 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3670
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003671- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3672
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003673Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003675
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003676- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3677 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003678 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003679
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003680- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3681 (like 1 + '').
3682
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003683Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003685
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003686- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3687 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3688 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3689 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003690 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003691 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3692
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003693- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3694 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3695 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3696 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3697
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003698- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3699 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003700 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3701 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3702 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003703
3704- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3705 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003706
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003707- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3708 bytes on its input.
3709
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003710Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003711-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003712
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003713- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003714 convenience function.
3715
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003716- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3717 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3718 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003719 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3720 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3721 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3722 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3723 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3724 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003725
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003726- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3727 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3728 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3729 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3730
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003731- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3732 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3733 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3734
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003735- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3736 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3737 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3738 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3739
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003740- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3741 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003743 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3744 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3745 new -l and -e options.
3746
3747- statcache is now deprecated.
3748
3749- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3750 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003752 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3753 time properly taken into account.
3754
3755- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3756 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3757 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3758 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3759
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003760Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003762
3763Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003764-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003765
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003766- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3767 is built with libdb3 if available.
3768
3769- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3770
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003771C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003773
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003774- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3775 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3776 PySequence_Size().
3777
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003778- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3779
3780- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3781 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3782 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3783
3784- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3785 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3786
3787- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3788 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3789
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003790New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003792
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003793- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3794 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3795
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003796- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3797 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3798
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003799- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3800
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003801Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003803
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003804- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3805 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3806
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003807Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003809
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003810Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003812
3813- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3814 removed completely in the next release.
3815
3816- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3817 OSX.
3818
3819- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3820 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3821
3822- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3823
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003824
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003825What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003826===========================
3827
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3829
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003830Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003832
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003833- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003834 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003835 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003836 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3837 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003838 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3839 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003840 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3841 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003842
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003843- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3844 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3845
3846- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3847 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3848
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003849Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003851
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003852- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3853 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3854 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3855 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3856 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3857 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3858 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3859 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3860
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003861- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3862 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3863 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3864 example).
3865
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003866- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003867 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003868 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003869 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003870
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003871- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3872 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3873 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003874 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003875
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003876- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3877 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3878 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3879 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3880 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3881 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3882
3883 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3884
3885 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3886
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003887Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003888-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003889
3890- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3891
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003892- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3893
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003894- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3895 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003896
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003897- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3898 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3899 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3900 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3901 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3902 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003903 attributes.
3904
3905- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3906 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3907 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003908
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003909- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3910 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3911 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003912
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003913- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3914 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3915 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003916 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3917 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3918
3919- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3920 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003921
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003922Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003924
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003925- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3926 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3927
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003928- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3929 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3930 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3931 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3932
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003933- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3934 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3935 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3936 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3937
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003938 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3939 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3940 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3941 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3942 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3943 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3944 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3945 without losing information).
3946
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003947- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003948 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3949 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3950 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3951 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3952 module).
3953
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003954 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003955 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3956 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3957 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3958 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003959
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003960- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003961 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3962 encoding.
3963
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003964- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3965 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003968 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3969
3970- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3971 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3972 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3973 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3974
3975- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3976
3977- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3978 ON, and OFF.
3979
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003980- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3981 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3982
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003983Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003985
3986- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3987 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3988 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003989
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003990- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3991 been added: -X and -E.
3992
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003993Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003995
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003996- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3997 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3998
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003999C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004001
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004002- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4003 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4004 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4005 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4006 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4007
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004008- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4009 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4010 as long) arguments.
4011
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004012- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4013 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4014 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4015 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4016 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4017 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4018
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004019- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4020 input.
4021
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004022New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004024
4025Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004027
4028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004030
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004031- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4032 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4033 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4034
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004035- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4036 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4037 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004038 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004039
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4041 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4042 import signal
4043 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004044
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004046 while 1:
4047 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004049 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4050 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4051 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4052 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004053
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004054
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004055What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4056===========================
4057
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4059
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004060Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004062
4063- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4064 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4065 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4066
4067- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4068 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4069 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4070 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4071 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4072 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4073 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004074
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004075- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004076 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004077 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4078 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4079 associate a docstring with a property.
4080
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004081- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4082 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4083 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4084 other built-in object types.
4085
4086- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4087 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4088 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4089 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4090 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4091
4092- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4093 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4094
4095- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4096 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004097 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004098 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4099 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4100 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4101 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4102 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4103
4104- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4105 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4106 class.
4107
4108- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4109 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4110 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4111 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4112
4113- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4114 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4115 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4116 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4117
4118- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4119 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4120
4121- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4122 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4123 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4124 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4125 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004126 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004127 with the same value as s.
4128
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004129- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4130
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004131Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004133
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004134- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4135
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004136- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4137 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4138 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4139 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4140 objects.
4141
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004142- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4143 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004144 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4145 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4146
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004147- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4148 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4149 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4150
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004151Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004153
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004154- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4155 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4156 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4157 by the instances.
4158
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004159- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4160 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4161 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4162
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004163- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4164 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4165 before the entire comparison is complete.
4166
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004167- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4168 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4169 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4170
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004171- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4172 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4173 getwriter().
4174
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004175- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4176 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4177
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004178- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004179 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4180 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4181
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004182- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4183 iterable object.
4184
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004185- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4186 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004187
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004188- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4189 authentication.
4190
4191- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4192 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004193
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004194- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004195 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4196 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4197 a sample driver.)
4198
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004199Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004201
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004202- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4203 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4204 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4205 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4206 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4207 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4208 kernel has large file support.
4209
4210- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4211 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4212 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4213 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4214 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4215
4216- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4217 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4218 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4219
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004220C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004222
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004223- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4224 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4225
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004226New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004227-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004228
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004229- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4230 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4231
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004232Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004234
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004235- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4236 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4237 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4238 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4239 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4240
4241- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4242 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4243 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4244 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4245
4246- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4247 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4248
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004249Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004251
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004252- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004253 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4254 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004255
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004256
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004257What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4258===========================
4259
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4261
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004262Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004264
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004265- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4266 big to represent as a C double.
4267
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004268- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4269 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4270 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4271 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4272 restriction).
4273
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004274- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4275 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4276 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4277 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4278 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4279
4280 >>> dir([])
4281 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4282 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4283 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4284 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4285 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4286 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4287 'reverse', 'sort']
4288
4289 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4290
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004291- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004292 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4293 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4294 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4295 OverflowError exception.
4296
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004297- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004298 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004299 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4300 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4301 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4302 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4303 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004304 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4306 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4307
4308 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4309 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4310 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4311 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004312
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004313- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004314 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4315 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4316 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4317 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4318 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4319 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4320 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4321 once it is created.
4322
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004323- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4324 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4325 (key, value) pairs.
4326
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004327- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004328 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4329 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4330
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004331- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4332 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4333 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4334 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4335 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004336
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004337- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004338 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4339 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4340
4341 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4342
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004343- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004344 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4345
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004346Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004348
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004349- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004350 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4351 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004352
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004353- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4354 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4355 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4356 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4357 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4358 in this area anymore).
4359
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004360- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4361 threading.Timer.
4362
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004363- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4364 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4365
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004366- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004367 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4368
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004369- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004370 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4371 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4372 converted to Python longs.
4373
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004374- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004375 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4376
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004377- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4378 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4379 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4380
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004381Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004383
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004384- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4385 division operators as per PEP 238.
4386
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004387Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004389
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004390- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4391 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4392 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4393 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4394
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004395C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004397
4398- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004399
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004400- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4401 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004402 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004403
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004404 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4405 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004406 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004408
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004409- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004410 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4411 module:
4412
4413 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004414
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004415 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4416 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004417
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004418 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4419 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004420
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004421 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4422
4423 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4424
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004425- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004426 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4427 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4428 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004429
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004430New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004432
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004433- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4434 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4435 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4436 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4437 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004438
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004439Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004441
4442Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004444
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004445- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4446 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4447 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4448 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004449 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4450 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4451 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4452 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4453 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004454
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004455- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004456 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4457
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004458
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004459What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4460===========================
4461
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4463
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004464Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004466
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004467- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4468 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4469
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004470- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4471 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4472 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004473
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004474- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4475 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4476 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4477 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004478
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004479- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4480
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004482
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004483Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004485
4486- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004487 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004488 the module docstring for details.
4489
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004490Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004492
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004493- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004494 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4495 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4496 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004497
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004498- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4499 Nick Mathewson.
4500
4501Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004503
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004504- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4505 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4506 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4507 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4508 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4509 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4510 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4511 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4512
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004513- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4514 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4515 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4516 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4517
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004518- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4519 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4520 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4521 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4522 come a long way).
4523
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004524- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4525 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4526 write filters for these warnings).
4527
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004528- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4529 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4530 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4531 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4532 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4533
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004534- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4535 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4536 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4537 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4538 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4539 older distribution.
4540
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004541Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004543
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004544- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4545 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004546 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004547
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004548- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4549 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4550 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4551
4552- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4553
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004554- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4555
4556- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4557
4558- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4559
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004560- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004561
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004562- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4563
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004564New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004566
4567C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004569
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004570- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4571 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4572 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4573 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4574 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4575 against buffer overruns.
4576
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004577- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004578 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4579 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004580 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4581 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4582 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4583
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004584- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4585 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4586 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4587 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4588 deprecated.
4589
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004590Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004592
4593- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4594 relevant is found.
4595
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004596
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004597What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004598===========================
4599
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4601
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004602Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004604
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004605- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4606 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4607 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4608 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4609 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4610 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4611 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4612 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004613 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004614 repaired.
4615
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004616- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004617 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004618 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4619 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4620 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4621 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4622 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4623 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4624 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4625 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4626
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004627- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4628 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4629 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4630 leading BMO character).
4631
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004632- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4633 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4634 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4635
4636 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4637 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4638 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004639
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004640 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4641 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4642 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4643 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4644 for various simple to use conversions.
4645
4646 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4647 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4648
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4650 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4651 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4652 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4653 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4654 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4655 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4656 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4657 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4658 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4659 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4660 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4661 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4662 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4663 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004664
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004665- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4666 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4667 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004668 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004669 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004670
4671 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004672 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4673 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4674 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4675 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4676 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004677 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4678 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004679
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004680 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4681 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4682 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004683 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004684
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004685- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4686 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4687 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4688 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4689 floating arithmetic,
4690
4691 x = 9007199254740992.0
4692 print long(x)
4693
4694 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4695 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4696 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4697 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4698 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4699 functions are of good quality).
4700
4701 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4702 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4703 algorithms to break.
4704
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004705- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4706 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4707 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4708 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4709 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4710 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4711 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4712 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4713 order.
4714
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004715- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4716 operation along the most common code paths.
4717
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004718- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4719 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4720
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004721- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4722 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4723 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4724 {}.update(UserDict())
4725
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004726- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4727 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4728 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4729 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4730 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4731 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4732 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4733 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4734
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004735- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004736 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004738 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004739 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4740 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004741 join() method of strings
4742 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004743 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4744 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004746 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004747
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004748- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4749 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4750
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004751- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4752 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4753
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004754- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4755 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4756 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4757 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4758
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004759- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4760 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004761 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004762 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4763 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004764
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004765- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4766
4767
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004768Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004770
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004771- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004772 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004773 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4774 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4775
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004776- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4777 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4778
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004779- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4780 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4781 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4782 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4783
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004784- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4785 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4786 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4787
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004788- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4789
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004790- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4791
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004792- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4793 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4794 that are still imported into string.py).
4795
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004796- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4797
4798- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4799 Now it does.
4800
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004801- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4802
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004803- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4804 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4805 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4806 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4807 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004808 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4809 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004810
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004811- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4812 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4813 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4814 'help(object)'.
4815
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004816Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004818
4819- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004820 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004821 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4822 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4823
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004824- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004825 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4826 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004827
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004828C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004830
4831- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4832 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004833
4834----
4835
4836**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**