blob: 05c9ce26ddfcd361ab54e116475fbb3ce5473338 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15Extension modules
16-----------------
17
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000018- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
19 Fixes SF bug #730685.
20
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000021Library
22-------
23
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +000024- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
25 __doc__ of data descriptors.
26
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +000027- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
28 in socket.py.
29
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000030Tools/Demos
31-----------
32
33Build
34-----
35
36C API
37-----
38
39New platforms
40-------------
41
42None this time.
43
44Tests
45-----
46
47- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
48 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
49
50Windows
51-------
52
53Mac
54---
55
56
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000057What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
58================================
59
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +000060*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000061
62Core and builtins
63-----------------
64
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +000065- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
66 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
67
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +000068- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
69 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
70 and cannot be strings).
71
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +000072- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
73 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
74 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
75 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
76
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +000077- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
78 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
79 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
80 Python itself.
81
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000082- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
83 the referenced object, if it has one.
84
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000085- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
86 the thread started at
87 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
88
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000089- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
90 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
91 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
92 placed on a list index.
93
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000094- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
95 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
96 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
97 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
98
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000099- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
100 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
101 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
102 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
103 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
104 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
105 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
106
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000107- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
108 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
109 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
110 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
111 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
112
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000113- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
114 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000115
116- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
117 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
118 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
119 #693195.)
120
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000121- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
122 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000123
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000124- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000125 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000126 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
127 interpreter executions, would fail.
128
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000129- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000130 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000131 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000132
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000133Extension modules
134-----------------
135
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000136- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
137 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
138 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
139 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
140
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000141- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
142 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
143
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000144- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
145 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
146 and Greg Chapman.)
147
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000148- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
149 recursively.
150
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000151- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000152 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
153 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
154 leaks.
155
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000156- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
157
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000158- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
159 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
160 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
161 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
162 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
163 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
164 #705836.
165
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000166- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
167 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
168
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000169- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
170 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
171 See SF bug #692416.
172
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000173- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
174 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
175
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000176- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
177 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
178 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000179
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000180- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000181 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
182 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
183
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000184- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
185 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
186 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
187 timeouts to work properly.
188
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000189Library
190-------
191
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000192- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
193 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
194 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
195 future release.
196
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000197- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
198 for querying platform dependent features.
199
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000200- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000201
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000202- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
203 pickle protocol versions.
204
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000205- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
206 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
207 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
208
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000209- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
210
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000211- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
212 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
213 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
214 modules.
215
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000216- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
217 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
218 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
219
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000220- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
221 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
222
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000223- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
224 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
225 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
226
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000227- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000228 MS Office extensions.
229
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000230- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
231 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
232
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000233- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
234 execution speed of expressions and statements.
235
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000236- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
237 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
238 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
239 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
240 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
241 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
242
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000243- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
244 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
245 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000246
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000247- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
248 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
249 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
250
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000251- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
252
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000253- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
254 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
255 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
256
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000257Tools/Demos
258-----------
259
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000260- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
261 See the module docstring for details.
262
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000263Build
264-----
265
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000266- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
267 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000268
269C API
270-----
271
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000272- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
273
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000274- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
275 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
276 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
277
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000278- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
279 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000280
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000281 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
282 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
283 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000284
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000285- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000286 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
287
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000288- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
289 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
290 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000291
292New platforms
293-------------
294
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000295None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000296
297Tests
298-----
299
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000300- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
301 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000302
303Windows
304-------
305
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000306- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
307 function.
308
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000309- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
310 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000311
312Mac
313---
314
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000315- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
316 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000317
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000318- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
319 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000320
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000321- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
322 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
323 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000324
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000325- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000326 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
327 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000328
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000329- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
330 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000331
332
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000333What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
334=================================
335
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000336*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000337
338Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000339-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000340
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000341- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
342 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
343 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
344
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000345- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
346 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
347 (SF patch #664376.)
348
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000349- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
350 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
351 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
352 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
353 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
354 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000355 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000356
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000357- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
358 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
359 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
360 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000361 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000362
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000363- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
364 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
365 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
366 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
367 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
368 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
369 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
370 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
371 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
372 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
373 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
374
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000375- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
376 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
377 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
378 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
379 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
380 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
381
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000382- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
383 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
384
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000385- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
386 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
387 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
388 case.)
389
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000390- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
391 passed as unicode strings.
392
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000393- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
394 See SF bug #683467.
395
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000396- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
397 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
398
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000399- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
400
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000401- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
402
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000403- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
404 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
405 arguments.
406
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000407- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
408 See SF bug #667147.
409
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000410- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000411 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000412 See SF bug #676155.
413
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000414- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000415 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000416 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
417 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
418 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
419 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
420 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
421 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000422
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000423Extension modules
424-----------------
425
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000426- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
427 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
428 tp_as_number pointer.
429
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000430- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
431 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
432 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
433 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
434 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
435
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000436- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
437
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000438- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
439
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000440- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000441 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000442 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
443 patch #678531.)
444
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000445- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
446 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
447
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000448- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
449 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
450
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000451- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
452
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000453- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
454 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
455 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
456
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000457- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
458
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000459- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
460 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
461
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000462- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000463
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000464- datetime changes:
465
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000466 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
467
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000468 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
469 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
470 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
471 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
472 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
473 now.
474
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000475 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000476 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
477 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000478
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000479 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000480 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000481 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
482 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
483 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
484 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000485
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000486 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
487 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
488 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000489 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
490
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000491 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
492 by a later example coded by Guido.
493
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000494 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000495 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
496 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
497 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000498 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
499 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
500
501 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
502 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
503 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
504 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
505 tzinfo subclass instance.
506
507 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
508 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
509 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
510 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
511 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
512 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
513 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
514 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000515
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000516 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
517 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
518 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
519 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
520 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000521 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
522
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000523 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000524
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000525 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
526 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
527 as a naive datetime object.
528
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000529 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
530 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
531 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
532
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000533 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
534 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
535 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
536 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
537 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
538 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
539 comparison.
540
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000541 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
542 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
543 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
544 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000545 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000546
547 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000548
549 and ::
550
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000551 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
552
553 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
554 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
555 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
556 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
557
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000558 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
559 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
560 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
561 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
562 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
563
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000564 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
565 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000566 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
567 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000568
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000569Library
570-------
571
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000572- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
573 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
574
575- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
576 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
577 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
578 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
579 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
580 See PEP 307 for details.
581
582- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
583 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
584
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000585- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
586 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000587 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000588 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
589 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000590 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000591
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000592- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
593 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
594
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000595- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
596 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
597 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
598
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000599- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
600
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000601- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
602 exception.
603
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000604- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
605 class.
606
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000607- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
608 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
609 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
610
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000611- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
612 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
613
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000614- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000615 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
616 See SF bug #659228.
617
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000618- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
619 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
620 See SF patch #651082.
621
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000622- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000623
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000624- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
625 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
626
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000627- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000628 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000629
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000630- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
631 DOS paths from other platforms.
632
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000633Tools/Demos
634-----------
635
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000636- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
637 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
638 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
639 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
640 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
641 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
642 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
643 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
644 example:
645
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000646 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
647 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000648
649 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
650
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000651
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000652Build
653-----
654
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000655- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
656 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
657 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000658 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
659
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000660 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
661
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000662- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
663 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
664 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
665 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
666 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
667 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
668 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
669 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
670 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
671
672- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
673 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
674 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
675 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
676
677- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
678 from the Tools/scripts directory.
679
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000680C API
681-----
682
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000683- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
684 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000685
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000686- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
687 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
688 tp_as_number pointer.
689
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000690- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
691 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
692 (SF #681367)
693
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000694- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
695 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
696 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
697 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000698
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000699Tests
700-----
701
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000702- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000703 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
704 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
705 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
706 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
707 pydoc.)
708
709- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
710
711- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000712
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000713Windows
714-------
715
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000716- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
717 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
718 time).
719
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000720- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
721 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
722
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000723- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
724 release without strong cryptography.
725
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000726- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000727 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000728
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000729- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
730 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
731
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000732Mac
733---
734
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000735- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
736 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000737
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000738- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
739 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
740 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000741
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000742- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
743 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000744
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000745- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
746 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
747 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
748 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000749
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000750- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000751 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
752 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
753 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000754
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000755
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000756What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000757=================================
758
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000759*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000760
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000761Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000762--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000763
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000764- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
765
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000766- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
767 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000768 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000769 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000770 a different meaning than before.
771
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000772- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000773 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000774 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000775
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000776- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000777 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000778 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000779
780- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
781 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
782 and deallocation.
783
784- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
785 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
786
787- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
788 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
789 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
790 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
791 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
792
793- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
794 now detected by the garbage collector.
795
796- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
797 [SF bug 519621]
798
799- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
800 identifier.
801
802- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
803 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
804 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
805 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
806 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
807 [SF bug 563060]
808
809- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
810 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
811 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
812 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
813 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
814
815- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
816 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
817 not called. [SF bug #537450]
818
819- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
820
821- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
822 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
823 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
824 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
825 state of the slots would be lost.)
826
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000827Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000828-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000829
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000830- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000831 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
832 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
833 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
834 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000835 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
836 Jython 2.1.
837
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000838- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000839 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000840 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
841 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
842 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
843 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
844 these, see PEP 302.
845
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000846- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
847 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
848 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
849
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000850- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
851 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
852 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
853
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000854- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
855 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
856 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
857
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000858- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
859 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
860 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
861 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
862 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
863 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
864 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
865 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
866 releases or implementations.
867
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000868- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000869 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
870 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000871
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000872- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
873 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
874
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000875- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
876 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
877 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
878
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000879- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
880 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
881
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000882- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
883 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000884 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
885 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000886
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000887- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
888 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
889 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
890 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
891 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
892
893 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
894 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
895 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
896 pattern.
897
898 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
899 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
900 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
901 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
902
903 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
904 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
905 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
906 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
907 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
908 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
909
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000910- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
911 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
912 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
913 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
914 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
915 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
916 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
917 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000918
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000919- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
920 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
921 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
922 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
923 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000924 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
925 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
926 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
927 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
928 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
929 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
930 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000931
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000932- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
933 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
934
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000935- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
936 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
937 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
938 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
939 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
940 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
941 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
942 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
943 to Zack Weinberg!
944
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000945- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
946 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
947 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
948 type. This has been fixed now.
949
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000950- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
951 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
952 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
953
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000954- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
955 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
956 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
957 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
958 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
959 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
960 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
961 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000962 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000963
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000964- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
965 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
966 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000967
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000968- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
969 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
970 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
971 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
972 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
973 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
974 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
975 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000976 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000977 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
978 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
979
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000980- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
981 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
982 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
983 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
984 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
985 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
986 this.)
987
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000988- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
989 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000990 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000991 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000992 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
993 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000994 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
995 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000996
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000997- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
998 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
999 currently running.
1000
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001001- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1002 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1003 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1004 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1005
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001006- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1007 as directory names.
1008
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001009- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1010 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1011
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001012- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1013 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1014
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001015- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001016 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1017 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001018
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001019- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1020 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1021 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1022 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1023 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1024
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001025- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1026 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1027 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1028 removed.
1029
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001030- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1031 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1032 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1033
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001034- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1035 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1036 to __debug__.
1037
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001038- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1039 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1040 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1041
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001042- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1043 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1044 deprecated now.
1045
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001046- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1047 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1048 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001049
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001050- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1051 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1052 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1053 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1054 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001055
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001056- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1057 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1058
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001059- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1060 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1061 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001062 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001063 is backward compatible.
1064
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001065- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1066 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1067 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1068 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1069 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1070
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001071- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1072 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1073 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1074 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1075 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1076 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001077
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001078- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1079 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1080
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001081- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1082 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1083
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001084- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1085 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1086 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1087 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1088 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1089
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001090- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1091 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1092 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1093
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001094- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001095 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1096
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001097- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1098 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1099 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001100
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001101- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1102 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1103
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001104- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1105 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1106 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1107
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001108- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1109
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001110Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001111-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001112
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001113- Added three operators to the operator module:
1114 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1115 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1116 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1117
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001118- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1119
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001120- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1121 archives.
1122
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001123- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1124 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1125 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1126
1127 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1128
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001129- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1130 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1131 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001132 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001133
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001134- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1135 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1136 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1137 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001138 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1139 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1140 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1141 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001142
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001143- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1144 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001145
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001146- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1147
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001148- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1149 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1150
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001151- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1152 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1153 supported.
1154
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001155- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1156
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001157- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1158 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001159
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001160- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1161 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1162
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001163- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1164
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001165- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1166 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1167
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001168- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1169 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1170 functions but callable type objects.
1171
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001172- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001173 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001174 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001175
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001176- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1177 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001178
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001179- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1180 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001181
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001182- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1183 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1184 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1185 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1186
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001187- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1188 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001189
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001190- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1191 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1192 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1193 and __imul__.
1194
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001195- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001196 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1197 is called.
1198
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001199- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1200 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1201 interpreter was compiled.
1202
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001203- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1204 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1205 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001206 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001207 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1208 1, not 2.
1209
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001210- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1211 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1212 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1213 limit.
1214
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001215- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1216 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1217 bug #623464.
1218
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001219- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1220 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1221 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1222 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1223
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001224Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001225-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001226
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001227- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1228
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001229- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1230 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1231 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1232 with Python 2.3a2.
1233
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001234- os.path exposes getctime.
1235
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001236- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001237 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001238 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001239 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001240 unit tests of floating point results.
1241
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001242- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1243 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1244 has been increased.
1245
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001246- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1247 executed.
1248
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001249- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1250 postinstallation script.
1251
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001252- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1253 test the current module.
1254
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001255- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001256 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1257 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1258 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1259 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1260
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001261- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001262 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001263 Ward's Optik package.
1264
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001265- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1266 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1267 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1268 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1269
1270- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1271 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001272 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001273
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001274- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1275 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1276 shelf are binary pickles.
1277
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001278- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1279 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1280
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001281- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1282 modules are iterators now.
1283
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001284- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1285 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1286 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1287 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1288 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1289 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001290
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001291- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1292 with their entity value.
1293
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001294- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1295
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001296- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1297 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001298
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001299- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1300 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001301 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001302
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001303- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1304 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1305 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1306 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1307 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1308 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1309 main():
1310
1311 import locale
1312 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1313
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001314- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1315 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1316
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001317- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1318 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1319 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1320 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1321 to the new standard.
1322
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001323- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1324 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1325 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1326 an extension to the database.
1327
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001328- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1329 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1330 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1331 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001332 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001333
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001334- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001335 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001336
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001337- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1338 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1339 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1340 bounded integers.
1341
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001342- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1343 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1344 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1345 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1346 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1347 in existence.
1348
1349 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1350 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1351 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1352 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1353 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1354 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1355
1356 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1357 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1358 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1359 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1360
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001361- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1362 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1363 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1364
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001365- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1366
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001367- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1368 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1369 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1370 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1371
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001372- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1373 argument.
1374
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001375- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1376 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1377 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1378 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1379 [SF patch 560794].
1380
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001381- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1382 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1383 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001384 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1385 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1386 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001387
1388- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1389 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001390
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001391- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1392 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1393 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1394 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001395
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001396- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1397 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1398 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1399 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1400 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1401
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001402- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001403
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001404- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1405
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001406- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1407 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1408 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1409 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1410 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1411 identical to None.
1412
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001413- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1414 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1415 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1416 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1417 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1418 results now.
1419
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001420- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1421 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1422
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001423- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1424 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1425 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1426 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1427 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1428 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1429 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1430 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1431
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001432- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1433
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001434- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1435 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1436
1437- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1438 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1439 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1440 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1441 and other systems.
1442
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001443- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1444 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1445 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1446 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 +00001447 work well with these.
1448
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001449- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1450
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001451- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001452 connections.
1453
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001454- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1455 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1456 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1457
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001458- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1459 sets
1460
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001461- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1462 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1463 name.
1464
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001465- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1466 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1467 passed in.
1468
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001469- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001470 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001471 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1472 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001473
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001474- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1475
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001476- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1477
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001478- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1479 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1480 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1481
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001482- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1483 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1484 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1485 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001486 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001487
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001488- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001489 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001490 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001491
1492- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1493 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1494 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1495
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001496- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001497 the value of its expression argument.
1498
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001499- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1500 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1501 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1502
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001503- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1504 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1505 skipstone browser was included.
1506
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001507- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1508 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1509
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001510Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001511-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001512
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001513- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1514 names in addition to accepting file names.
1515
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001516- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1517 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1518 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1519 still used and useful.)
1520
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001521- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1522 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1523 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1524 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001525
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001526- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1527 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1528 the generated binary.
1529
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001530Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001531-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001532
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001533- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1534
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001535- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1536 except in the hands of experts.
1537
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001538- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001539 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1540 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1541 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001542
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001543- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1544 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1545 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1546 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1547 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1548 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1549 builds.
1550
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001551- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1552 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1553 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1554 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1555 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1556 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1557 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1558 new type.
1559
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001560- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001561
1562 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1563 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1564 positive infinities.
1565
1566 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1567 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1568 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1569 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1570 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1571 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1572 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1573
1574 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1575
1576 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1577
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001578- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1579 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1580 size of the executable.
1581
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001582- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1583 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1584 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1585 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001586
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001587- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1588
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001589- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1590 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1591 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001592
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001593- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1594 well as Unix.
1595
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001596- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1597 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1598 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1599 modules in the README file for details.
1600
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001601C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001602-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001603
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001604- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1605 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001606 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001607 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001608 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001609
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001610- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1611 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1612 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1613 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1614 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1615 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001616 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001617 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1618 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1619 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1620 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1621 aligned.)
1622
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001623- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1624 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1625 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1626
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001627- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1628 level.
1629
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001630- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1631 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1632 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1633 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1634 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1635
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001636- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1637 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1638 code.
1639
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001640- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1641 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1642 adjusting for negative indices.
1643
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001644- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1645 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1646 object.
1647
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001648- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1649 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1650 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1651
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001652- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1653 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001654
1655- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1656
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001657- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1658 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1659 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1660 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1661
1662- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1663
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001664- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001665
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001666- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001667 without going through the buffer API.
1668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001669- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001670
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001671- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1672 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1673 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1674 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1675
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001676- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1677 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1678
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001679- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001680 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1681
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001682New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001683-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001684
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001685- OpenVMS is now supported.
1686
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001687- AtheOS is now supported.
1688
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001689- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1690
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001691- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1692
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001693Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001694-----
1695
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001696- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1697 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1698 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001699
1700Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001701-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001702
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001703- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1704 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1705 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1706 bugs.
1707 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001708 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001709 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1710 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001711 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001712
1713- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001714 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001715
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001716- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1717 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1718
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001719- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1720 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001721 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001722 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1723
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001724- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1725 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1726 use files" uninstall option).
1727
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001728- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1729
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001730- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1731 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1732
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001733- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1734 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1735 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1736
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001737- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1738 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1739 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1740 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1741 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001742 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1743 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1744 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001745
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001746- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001747 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001748 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1749 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1750 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1751 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1752 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1753 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1754 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1755 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1756 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1757 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1758 work around.
1759
1760- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1761 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1762 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1763 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1764 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1765 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1766 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1767 specified with O_CREAT too).
1768
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001769Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001770----
1771
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001772- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001773
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001774- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1775 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1776 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1777
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001778- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1779 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1780 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1781
1782- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1783 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1784 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1785 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1786 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1787 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1788 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1789 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001790
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001791- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1792 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1793 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001794
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001795- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1796 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1797 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1798 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1799 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001800
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001801- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1802 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1803 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001804
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001805- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1806 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001807
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001808- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1809 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1810 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1811 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1812 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001813
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001814- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1815 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1816 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1817
1818- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1819 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1820 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001821
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001822- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1823 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1824 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1825 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001826 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001827
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001828- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1829 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001830
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001831- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1832 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001833
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001834- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001835 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001836 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1837 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001838
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001839
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001840What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001841===============================
1842
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001843*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1844
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001845Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001846--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001847
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001848- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1849 with a custom metaclass.
1850
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001851Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001852-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001853
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001854- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1855 are proxies.
1856
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001857Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001858-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001859
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001860- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1861 very short strings.
1862
1863- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1864 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1865 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1866 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1867 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1868
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001869Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001870-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001871
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001872- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1873 close or delete time).
1874
1875- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1876 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1877
1878- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1879
1880- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001881 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001882
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001883Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001884-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001885
1886Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001887-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001888
1889C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001890-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001891
1892New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001893-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001894
1895Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001896-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001897
1898Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001899-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001900
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001901- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1902
1903- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1904 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1905
1906- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1907 deleted at process exit time.
1908
1909- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1910 in backslash.
1911
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001912Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001913----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001914
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001915- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1916 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1917 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1918
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001919
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001920What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001921===========================
1922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001923*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1924
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001925Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001926--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001927
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001928- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1929 been extensively updated. See
1930
1931 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1932
1933 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1934
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001935- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1936 deleted!
1937
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001938- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1939 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1940 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1941 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1942 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1943
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001944- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1945
1946 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1947 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1948
1949 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1950 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1951 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1952 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1953 supported anyway.
1954
1955 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1956 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1957
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001958- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1959 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1960 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1961 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1962 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001963
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001964- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1965 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1966 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1967
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001968Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001969-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001970
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001971- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1972 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1973 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1974 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1975 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1976 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001977 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1978 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1979 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1980 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001981
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001982- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1983 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1984 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1985
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001986Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001987-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001988
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001989- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1990
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001991Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001992-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001993
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001994- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1995 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1996 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1997 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1998 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1999 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2000
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002001- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2002
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002003- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2004
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002005- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2006
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002007- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2008 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2009 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2010
2011- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2012
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002013Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002014-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002015
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002016- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2017 off a search on Google.
2018
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002019Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002020-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002021
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002022- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2023 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2024 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2025 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2026 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2027 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2028 other platforms should do likewise.
2029
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002030- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2031 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2032 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2033
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002034C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002035-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002036
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002037- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2038 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2039 producing key-value pairs.
2040
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002041- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002042 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002043 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2044 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2045 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2046 previously went unchallenged.
2047
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002048New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002049-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002050
2051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002052-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002053
2054Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002055-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002056
2057Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002058----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002059
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002060- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2061 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002062
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002063- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2064 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2065 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2066 home.
2067
2068
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002069What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002070===========================
2071
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002072*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2073
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002074Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002075--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002076
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002077- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2078 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002079
2080 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002081 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002082
2083 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2084 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002085 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002086 This needs to be documented.
2087
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002088- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2089 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2090
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002091- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2092 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2093 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2094
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002095- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2096 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2097
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002098- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2099 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2100 class forbids it).
2101
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002102- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2103 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2104 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2105
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002106- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2107
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002108Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002109-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002110
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002111- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2112 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002113 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002114
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002115- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2116 (like 1 + '').
2117
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002118Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002119-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002120
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002121- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2122 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2123 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2124 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002125 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002126 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2127
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002128- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2129 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2130 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2131 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2132
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002133- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2134 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002135 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2136 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2137 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002138
2139- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2140 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002141
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002142- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2143 bytes on its input.
2144
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002145Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002147
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002148- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002149 convenience function.
2150
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002151- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2152 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2153 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002154 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2155 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2156 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2157 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2158 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2159 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002160
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002161- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2162 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2163 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2164 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2165
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002166- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2167 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2168 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2169
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002170- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2171 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2172 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2173 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2174
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002175- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2176 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002177 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002178 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2179 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2180 new -l and -e options.
2181
2182- statcache is now deprecated.
2183
2184- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2185 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002186 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002187 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2188 time properly taken into account.
2189
2190- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2191 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2192 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2193 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2194
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002195Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002196-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002197
2198Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002199-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002200
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002201- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2202 is built with libdb3 if available.
2203
2204- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2205
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002206C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002207-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002208
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002209- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2210 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2211 PySequence_Size().
2212
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002213- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2214
2215- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2216 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2217 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2218
2219- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2220 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2221
2222- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2223 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2224
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002225New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002226-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002227
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002228- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2229 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2230
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002231- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2232 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2233
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002234- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2235
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002236Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002237-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002238
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002239- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2240 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2241
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002242Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002243-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002244
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002245Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002246----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002247
2248- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2249 removed completely in the next release.
2250
2251- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2252 OSX.
2253
2254- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2255 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2256
2257- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2258
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002259
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002260What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002261===========================
2262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002263*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2264
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002265Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002266--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002267
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002268- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002269 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002270 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002271 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2272 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002273 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2274 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002275 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2276 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002277
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002278- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2279 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2280
2281- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2282 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2283
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002284Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002285-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002286
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002287- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2288 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2289 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2290 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2291 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2292 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2293 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2294 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2295
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002296- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2297 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2298 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2299 example).
2300
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002301- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002302 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002303 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002304 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002305
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002306- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2307 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2308 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002309 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002310
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002311- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2312 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2313 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2314 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2315 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2316 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2317
2318 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2319
2320 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2321
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002322Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002323-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002324
2325- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2326
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002327- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2328
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002329- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2330 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002331
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002332- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2333 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2334 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2335 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2336 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2337 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002338 attributes.
2339
2340- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2341 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2342 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002343
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002344- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2345 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2346 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002347
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002348- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2349 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2350 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002351 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2352 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2353
2354- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2355 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002356
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002357Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002358-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002359
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002360- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2361 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2362
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002363- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2364 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2365 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2366 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2367
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002368- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2369 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2370 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2371 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2372
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002373 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2374 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2375 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2376 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2377 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2378 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2379 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2380 without losing information).
2381
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002382- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002383 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2384 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2385 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2386 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2387 module).
2388
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002389 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002390 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2391 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2392 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2393 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002394
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002395- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002396 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2397 encoding.
2398
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002399- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2400 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2401
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002402- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002403 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2404
2405- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2406 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2407 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2408 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2409
2410- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2411
2412- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2413 ON, and OFF.
2414
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002415- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2416 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2417
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002418Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002419-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002420
2421- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2422 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2423 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002424
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002425- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2426 been added: -X and -E.
2427
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002428Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002429-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002430
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002431- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2432 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2433
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002434C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002435-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002436
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002437- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2438 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2439 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2440 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2441 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2442
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002443- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2444 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2445 as long) arguments.
2446
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002447- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2448 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2449 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2450 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2451 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2452 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2453
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002454- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2455 input.
2456
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002457New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002458-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002459
2460Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002461-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002462
2463Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002464-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002465
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002466- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2467 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2468 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2469
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002470- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2471 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2472 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002473 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002474
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002475 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2476 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2477 import signal
2478 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002479
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002480 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002481 while 1:
2482 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002483 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002484 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2485 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2486 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2487 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002488
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002489
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002490What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2491===========================
2492
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002493*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2494
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002495Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002496--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002497
2498- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2499 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2500 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2501
2502- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2503 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2504 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2505 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2506 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2507 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2508 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002509
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002510- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002511 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002512 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2513 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2514 associate a docstring with a property.
2515
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002516- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2517 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2518 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2519 other built-in object types.
2520
2521- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2522 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2523 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2524 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2525 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2526
2527- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2528 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2529
2530- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2531 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002532 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002533 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2534 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2535 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2536 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2537 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2538
2539- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2540 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2541 class.
2542
2543- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2544 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2545 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2546 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2547
2548- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2549 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2550 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2551 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2552
2553- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2554 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2555
2556- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2557 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2558 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2559 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2560 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002561 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002562 with the same value as s.
2563
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002564- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2565
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002566Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002567----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002568
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002569- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2570
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002571- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2572 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2573 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2574 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2575 objects.
2576
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002577- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2578 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002579 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2580 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2581
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002582- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2583 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2584 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2585
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002586Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002587-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002588
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002589- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2590 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2591 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2592 by the instances.
2593
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002594- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2595 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2596 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2597
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002598- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2599 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2600 before the entire comparison is complete.
2601
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002602- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2603 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2604 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2605
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002606- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2607 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2608 getwriter().
2609
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002610- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2611 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2612
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002613- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002614 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2615 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2616
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002617- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2618 iterable object.
2619
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002620- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2621 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002622
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002623- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2624 authentication.
2625
2626- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2627 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002628
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002629- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002630 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2631 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2632 a sample driver.)
2633
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002634Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002635-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002636
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002637- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2638 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2639 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2640 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2641 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2642 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2643 kernel has large file support.
2644
2645- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2646 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2647 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2648 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2649 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2650
2651- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2652 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2653 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2654
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002655C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002656-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002657
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002658- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2659 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2660
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002661New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002662-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002663
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002664- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2665 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2666
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002667Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002668-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002669
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002670- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2671 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2672 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2673 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2674 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2675
2676- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2677 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2678 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2679 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2680
2681- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2682 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2683
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002684Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002685-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002686
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002687- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002688 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2689 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002690
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002691
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002692What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2693===========================
2694
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002695*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2696
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002697Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002698----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002699
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002700- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2701 big to represent as a C double.
2702
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002703- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2704 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2705 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2706 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2707 restriction).
2708
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002709- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2710 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2711 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2712 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2713 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2714
2715 >>> dir([])
2716 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2717 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2718 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2719 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2720 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2721 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2722 'reverse', 'sort']
2723
2724 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2725
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002726- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002727 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2728 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2729 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2730 OverflowError exception.
2731
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002732- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002733 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002734 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2735 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2736 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2737 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2738 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002739 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002740 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2741 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2742
2743 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2744 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2745 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2746 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002747
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002748- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002749 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2750 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2751 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2752 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2753 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2754 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2755 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2756 once it is created.
2757
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002758- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2759 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2760 (key, value) pairs.
2761
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002762- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002763 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2764 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2765
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002766- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2767 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2768 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2769 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2770 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002771
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002772- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002773 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2774 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2775
2776 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2777
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002778- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002779 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2780
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002781Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002782-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002783
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002784- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002785 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2786 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002787
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002788- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2789 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2790 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2791 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2792 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2793 in this area anymore).
2794
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002795- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2796 threading.Timer.
2797
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002798- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2799 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2800
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002801- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002802 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2803
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002804- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002805 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2806 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2807 converted to Python longs.
2808
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002809- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002810 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2811
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002812- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2813 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2814 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2815
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002816Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002817-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002818
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002819- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2820 division operators as per PEP 238.
2821
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002822Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002823-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002824
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002825- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2826 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2827 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2828 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2829
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002832
2833- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002834
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002835- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2836 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002837 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002838
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002839 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2840 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002841 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002842 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002843
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002844- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002845 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2846 module:
2847
2848 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002849
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002850 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2851 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002852
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002853 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2854 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002855
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002856 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2857
2858 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2859
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002860- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002861 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2862 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2863 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002864
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002865New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002867
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002868- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2869 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2870 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2871 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2872 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002873
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002874Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002875-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002876
2877Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002878-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002879
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002880- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2881 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2882 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2883 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002884 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2885 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2886 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2887 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2888 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002889
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002890- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002891 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2892
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002893
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002894What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2895===========================
2896
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002897*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2898
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002899Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002901
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002902- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2903 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2904
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002905- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2906 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2907 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002908
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002909- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2910 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2911 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2912 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002913
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002914- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2915
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002916- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002917
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002918Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002919-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002920
2921- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002922 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002923 the module docstring for details.
2924
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002925Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002927
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002928- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002929 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2930 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2931 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002932
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002933- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2934 Nick Mathewson.
2935
2936Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002938
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002939- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2940 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2941 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2942 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2943 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2944 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2945 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2946 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2947
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002948- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2949 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2950 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2951 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2952
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002953- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2954 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2955 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2956 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2957 come a long way).
2958
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002959- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2960 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2961 write filters for these warnings).
2962
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002963- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2964 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2965 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2966 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2967 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2968
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002969- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2970 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2971 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2972 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2973 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2974 older distribution.
2975
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002976Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002977-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002978
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002979- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2980 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002981 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002982
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002983- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2984 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2985 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2986
2987- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2988
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002989- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2990
2991- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2992
2993- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2994
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002996
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002997- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2998
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002999New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003001
3002C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003003-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003004
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003005- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3006 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3007 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3008 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3009 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3010 against buffer overruns.
3011
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003012- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003013 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3014 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003015 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3016 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3017 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3018
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003019- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3020 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3021 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3022 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3023 deprecated.
3024
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003025Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003027
3028- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3029 relevant is found.
3030
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003031
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003032What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003033===========================
3034
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003035*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3036
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003037Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003038----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003039
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003040- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3041 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3042 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3043 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3044 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3045 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3046 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3047 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003048 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003049 repaired.
3050
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003051- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003052 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003053 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3054 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3055 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3056 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3057 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3058 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3059 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3060 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3061
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003062- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3063 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3064 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3065 leading BMO character).
3066
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003067- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3068 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3069 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3070
3071 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3072 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3073 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003074
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003075 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3076 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3077 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3078 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3079 for various simple to use conversions.
3080
3081 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3082 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3083
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003084 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3085 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3086 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3087 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3088 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3089 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3090 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3091 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3092 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3093 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3094 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3095 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3096 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3097 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3098 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003099
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003100- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3101 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3102 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003103 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003104 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003105
3106 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003107 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3108 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3109 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3110 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3111 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003112 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3113 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003114
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003115 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3116 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3117 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003118 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003119
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003120- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3121 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3122 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3123 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3124 floating arithmetic,
3125
3126 x = 9007199254740992.0
3127 print long(x)
3128
3129 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3130 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3131 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3132 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3133 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3134 functions are of good quality).
3135
3136 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3137 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3138 algorithms to break.
3139
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003140- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3141 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3142 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3143 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3144 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3145 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3146 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3147 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3148 order.
3149
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003150- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3151 operation along the most common code paths.
3152
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003153- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3154 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3155
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003156- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3157 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3158 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3159 {}.update(UserDict())
3160
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003161- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3162 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3163 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3164 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3165 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3166 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3167 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3168 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3169
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003170- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003171 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003172
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003173 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003174 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3175 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003176 join() method of strings
3177 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003178 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3179 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003181 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003182
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003183- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3184 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3185
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003186- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3187 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3188
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003189- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3190 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3191 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3192 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3193
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003194- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3195 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003196 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003197 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3198 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003199
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003200- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3201
3202
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003203Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003205
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003206- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003207 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003208 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3209 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3210
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003211- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3212 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3213
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003214- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3215 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3216 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3217 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3218
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003219- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3220 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3221 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3222
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003223- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3224
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003225- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3226
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003227- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3228 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3229 that are still imported into string.py).
3230
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003231- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3232
3233- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3234 Now it does.
3235
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003236- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3237
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003238- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3239 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3240 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3241 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3242 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003243 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3244 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003245
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003246- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3247 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3248 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3249 'help(object)'.
3250
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003251Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003253
3254- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003255 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003256 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3257 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3258
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003259- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003260 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3261 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003262
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003263C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003264-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003265
3266- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3267 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268
3269----
3270
3271**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**