blob: 8b79fb6ce5c25e579218bd7433aced24f8b55e55 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000015- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
16 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
17 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
18
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000019- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
20 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000021 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000022
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000023- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
24 now encodes backslash correctly.
25
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000026- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
27
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000028- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
29 and long longs.
30
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000031- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
32 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
33 message in this case.
34
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000035- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
36 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
37 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
38 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
39 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
40
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000041- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000042
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000043- Speed up some Unicode operations.
44
45- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
46
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000047- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000048 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
49
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000050- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
51
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000052- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
53 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
54
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000055- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
56
57- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
58
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000059- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
60 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
61 was empty.
62
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000063- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
64 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
65
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000066- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000067 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000068
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000069- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
70 codes.
71
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000072- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
73 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
74 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
75
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000076- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
77 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
78
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000079- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000080 (fixes bug #1119418).
81
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000082- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
83
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000084- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
85 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
86
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000087- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
88 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
89 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
90
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000091- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
92
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000093- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
94 reference counts in some error exit cases.
95
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000096- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
97 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
98 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
99 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
100 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
101 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
102 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
103 realloc.
104
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000105- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
106 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
107
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000108- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
109 like their int counterparts.
110
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000111- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
112 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
113 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
114 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
115 for a longer write-up of the problem).
116
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000117- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
118 serializing floats.
119
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000120- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
121 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
122 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
123
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000124- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
125 278.
126
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000127- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
128 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
129 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
130 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000131 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000132 PyNumber_*().
133 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
134
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000135- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
136 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
137 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
138 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
139
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000140- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
141 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
142 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
143 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
144 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
145
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000146- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
147 disabled caused a crash.
148
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000149- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
150 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
151
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000152- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000153 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
154
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000155- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
156
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000157- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000158 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
159 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
160 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000161
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000162- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
163
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000164- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
165 returning None.
166
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000167- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000168 ('\') with a specific error message.
169
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000170- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
171
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000172- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
173 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
174
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000175- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000176 an ferror() call.
177
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000178- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
179 list.sort().
180
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000181- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
182 (2+3) --> (5).
183
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000184- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
185
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000186- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
187 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000188
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000189- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
190 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
191 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
192
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000193- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
194 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
195 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
196
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000197Extension Modules
198-----------------
199
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000200- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
201
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000202- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
203 problem on AIX.
204
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000205- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
206
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000207- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
208
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000209- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
210
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000211- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
212 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
213
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000214- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
215
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000216- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
217 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
218
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000219- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
220
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000221- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
222 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
223
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000224- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
225 returns in cStringIO.c.
226
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000227- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
228 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
229
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000230- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
231
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000232- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
233
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000234- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
235 the file system encoding.
236
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000237- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
238 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000239
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000240- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
241
242- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000243 line without newlines.
244
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000245- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
246 on Windows.
247
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000248- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000249 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
250
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000251- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
252 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
253 for large or negative values.
254
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000255- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000256 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000257
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000258- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
259
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000260- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
261 if available on the platform.
262
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000263- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
264 available on the platform.
265
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000266- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
267 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
268
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000269- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
270
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000271- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
272 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
273 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
274
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000275- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
276
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000277- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
278 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
279
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000280- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000281 file size.
282
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000283- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
284
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000285- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
286 {remove_history,replace_history}
287
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000288- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
289 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000290
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000291- stat_float_times is now True.
292
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000293- array.array objects are now picklable.
294
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000295- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
296 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
297
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000298- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
299 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
300 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
301
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000302- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
303 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000304
305Library
306-------
307
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000308- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000309 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
310 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
311 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
312 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
313
314 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
315 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
316 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
317 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
318 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000319
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000320- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
321 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
322 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
323
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000324- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
325
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000326- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
327
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000328- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
329 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
330 illegal argument)
331
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000332- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
333 is an error in the format string.
334
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000335- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
336
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000337- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000338 "parent" argument.
339
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000340- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
341 for padding.
342
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000343- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
344 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
345
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000346- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
347 to get the correct encoding.
348
349- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
350 languages.
351
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000352- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
353
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000354- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
355
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000356- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
357
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000358- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
359 functionality.
360
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000361- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
362
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000363- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
364 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
365
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000366- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
367 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
368 match the Content-Length header.
369
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000370- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
371
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000372- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
373 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000374 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000375
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000376- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
377
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000378- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
379
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000380- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
381 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
382
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000383- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
384 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
385 Tkdnd.
386
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000387- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
388 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
389
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000390- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
391 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
392
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000393- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000394 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
395
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000396- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
397 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
398
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000399- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
400 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
401
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000402- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000403 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000404
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000405- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
406
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000407- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
408 error messages.
409
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000410- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
411
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000412- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
413 Bug #1224621.
414
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000415- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
416 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
417 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
418 terminates by raising StopIteration.
419
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000420- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
421
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000422- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
423 component of the path.
424
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000425- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
426 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
427 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
428 class at all.
429
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000430- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
431 files to PyPI.
432
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000433- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
434 them to PyPI.
435
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000436- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
437 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
438 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
439 work as expected.
440
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000441- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
442 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
443
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000444- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000445 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
446
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000447- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
448
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000449- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
450 to build.
451
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000452- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
453 symbolic links on Windows.
454
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000455- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000456 profile.py if available.
457
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000458- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
459
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000460- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
461 in LWPCookieJar.
462
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000463- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
464
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000465- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
466
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000467- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
468
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000469- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
470
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000471- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
472
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000473- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
474
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000475- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
476
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000477- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
478
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000479- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
480 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
481 be exploited in various ways.
482
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000483- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000484 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
485
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000486- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
487 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
488
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000489- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000490 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
491
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000492- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
493
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000494- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
495
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000496- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
497
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000498- Enhancements to the csv module:
499
500 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000501 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000502 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000503 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
504 reporting.
505 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
506 dictates.
507 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000508 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000509 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000510 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
511 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000512 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
513 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000514 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000515 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
516 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
517 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
518 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
519 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
520 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
521 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
522 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
523 without first creating a dialect class.
524 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
525 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
526 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000527 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000528 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
529 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000530 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
531 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
532 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
533 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000534 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
535 This has been fixed.
536
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000537- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
538 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
539 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
540 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
541
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000542- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
543
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000544- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
545 (Bug #951915).
546
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000547- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
548 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
549 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000550 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000551
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000552- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
553
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000554- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
555 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
556
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000557- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
558
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000559- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
560
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000561- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
562
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000563- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
564
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000565- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
566
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000567- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
568 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
569 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
570
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000571- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000572 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000573
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000574- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
575 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
576 tokenizer with very long source lines.
577
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000578- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
579 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
580
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000581- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
582 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000583
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000584- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
585 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
586
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000587- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
588 correctly.
589
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000590- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
591 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
592 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
593 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
594 between two lines.
595
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000596- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
597 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
598 handlers.
599
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000600- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000601 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
602 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000603
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000604- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
605 considering it exactly like a '*'.
606
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000607- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
608 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000609
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000610- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
611
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000612Build
613-----
614
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000615- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
616 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
617
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000618- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
619 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
620
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000621- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
622 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
623 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000624 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000625
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000626- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
627 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
628 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
629
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000630- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
631
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000632- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
633 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
634
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000635- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
636 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
637 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
638 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
639 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
640 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
641 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
642 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
643
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000644- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
645 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
646 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
647 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
648
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000649
650C API
651-----
652
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000653- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
654
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000655- Removed PyRange_New().
656
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000657- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
658 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
659 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
660 mappings.
661
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000662
663Tests
664-----
665
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000666- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000667
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000668- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
669 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
670
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000671
672Documentation
673-------------
674
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000675- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
676
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000677- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
678
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000679- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
680
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000681- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
682
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000683- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
684
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000685- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
686
687- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
688
689- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
690
691- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
692
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000693- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
694 Closes bug #1166582.
695
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000696- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
697 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
698 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
699
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000700Mac
701---
702
703
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000704New platforms
705-------------
706
707- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
708
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000709
710Tools/Demos
711-----------
712
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000713- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
714 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
715 source files that need an encoding declaration.
716 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
717
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000718- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
719
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000720- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000721
722
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000723What's New in Python 2.4 final?
724===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000725
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000726*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000727
728Core and builtins
729-----------------
730
731- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
732 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
733 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
734
735
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000736What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
737==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000738
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000739*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000740
741Core and builtins
742-----------------
743
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000744- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
745 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
746 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
747
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000748
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000749Library
750-------
751
752- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
753 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
754 raised is re-raised.
755
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000756- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
757 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
758
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000759- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
760 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
761 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
762 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
763 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
764 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
765 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
766 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
767 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
768 by the slice are recomputed now.
769
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000770- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000771
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000772Build
773-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000774
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000775- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
776 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
777 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000778
779C API
780-----
781
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000782- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
783
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000784
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000785What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
786================================
787
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000788*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000789
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000790License
791-------
792
793The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
794is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
795changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
796Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
797intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
798durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
799the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
800License::
801
802 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
803
804says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
805to Python 2.1.1.
806
807The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
808License Version 2.
809
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000810Core and builtins
811-----------------
812
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000813- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
814 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
815 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
816 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
817 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
818 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
819 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000820 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000821 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
822 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
823
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000824- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000825
826Extension Modules
827-----------------
828
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000829- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
830 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
831 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
832 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000833
834Library
835-------
836
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000837- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
838 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
839 returned.
840
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000841- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
842
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000843- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
844 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
845
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000846- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
847
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000848- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
849 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000850
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000851- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
852
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000853- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
854
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000855- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000856 the source code is updated and reloaded.
857
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000858Build
859-----
860
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000861- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000862
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000863What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
864================================
865
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000866*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000867
868Core and builtins
869-----------------
870
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000871- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000872 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
873
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000874- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
875 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
876 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
877 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
878
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000879- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
880 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
881
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000882- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
883 constant.
884
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000885- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
886 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
887 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
888 large), and to anomalies such as
889 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
890 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
891 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
892 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000893
894Extension modules
895-----------------
896
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000897- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
898 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000899 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
900 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
901 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000902
903Library
904-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000905
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000906- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000907 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000908 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
909 --swig-cpp.
910
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000911- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
912 it is set.
913
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000914- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000915
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000916- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
917 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
918 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
919 Closes bug #1039270.
920
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000921- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000922
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000923 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000924 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
925 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
926 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
927 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
928 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
929 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
930 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
931 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
932 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
933 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
934 + Updates to documentation.
935
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000936- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
937 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
938 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
939 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
940
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000941- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000942
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000943- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
944 applications should use the getmember function.
945
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000946- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
947
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000948- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
949 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
950 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
951 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
952 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
953 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
954 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
955 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
956 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
957
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000958- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
959 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000960 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000961
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000962- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
963 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
964 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
965 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
966 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
967 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
968 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
969 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000970
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000971- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
972 the new public features (of which there are many).
973
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000974- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000975 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
976 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
977 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
978 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000979 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000980
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000981- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
982
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000983- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
984 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
985 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
986 options.
987
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000988- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
989 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
990 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
991 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
992 conditions under which non-string values work.
993
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000994Build
995-----
996
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000997- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
998 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
999 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1000
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001001- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1002 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1003 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1004 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1005 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001006
1007C API
1008-----
1009
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001010- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1011 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1012
1013- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1014
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001015- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1016 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1017 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1018 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1019 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1020 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1021 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1022 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1023 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1024
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001025- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1026
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001027- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1028 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1029 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001030
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001031Tests
1032-----
1033
1034- test__locale ported to unittest
1035
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001036Mac
1037---
1038
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001039- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1040 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1041 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001042
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001043Tools/Demos
1044-----------
1045
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001046- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1047 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1048 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1049 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1050 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001051
1052
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001053What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1054=================================
1055
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001056*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001057
1058Core and builtins
1059-----------------
1060
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001061- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001062 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1063
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001064- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1065 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1066 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1067 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1068 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1069 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1070 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1071 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001072 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1073 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1074 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1075 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1076 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001077
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001078- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1079 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1080 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1081 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1082 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1083
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001084- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1085
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001086- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1087 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1088
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001089- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1090 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1091 modified the list.
1092
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001093- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1094 functions is now writable.
1095
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001096- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1097 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1098 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1099 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1100
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001101- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1102 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1103 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1104 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1105 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001106
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001107- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1108 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1109
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001110Extension modules
1111-----------------
1112
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001113- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1114
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001115- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1116 data.
1117
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001118- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1119 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1120 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1121 supposed to have been truncated away.
1122
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001123- Added socket.socketpair().
1124
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001125- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1126 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1127
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001128- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001129 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1130
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001131Library
1132-------
1133
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001134- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001135 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001136
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001137- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1138 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1139
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001140- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1141 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1142
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001143- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1144
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001145- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1146 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001147
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001148- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1149 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1150
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001151- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1152
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001153- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1154
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001155- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1156
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001157- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1158 Percivall.
1159
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001160- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1161 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1162
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001163- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1164 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1165 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001166 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001167
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001168- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1169 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1170 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1171 and exponent.
1172
1173- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1174
1175- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001176 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001177 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1178
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001179- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1180 to the readline module.
1181
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001182- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001183 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1184 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001185
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001186- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1187 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1188 contains symlinks.
1189
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001190- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1191 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1192
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001193- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1194 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1195 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1196
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001197- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1198 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1199 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1200 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1201 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1202 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1203 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1204 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1205 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1206 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1207 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1208 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1209 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1210
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001211- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1212
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001213Tools/Demos
1214-----------
1215
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001216- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1217 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1218
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001219- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1220
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001221Build
1222-----
1223
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001224- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1225 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1226 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1227 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1228 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1229 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1230 plans to do so.
1231
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001232- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1233 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1234
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001235- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1236 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1237
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001238- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1239 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1240
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001241- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1242 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1243
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001244- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1245 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1246
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001247C API
1248-----
1249
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001250..
1251
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001252Documentation
1253-------------
1254
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001255- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1256 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1257
1258- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1259 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1260 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001261
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001262New platforms
1263-------------
1264
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001265- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1266
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001267Tests
1268-----
1269
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001270..
1271
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001272Windows
1273-------
1274
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001275- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1276 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1277 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1278 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1279 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1280 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1281 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1282 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1283 the problem.
1284
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001285Mac
1286---
1287
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001288..
1289
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001290
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001291What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1292=================================
1293
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001294*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001295
1296Core and builtins
1297-----------------
1298
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001299- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1300 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1301 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1302 sensitive code.
1303
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001304- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001305 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001306
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001307 @staticmethod
1308 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001309
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001310 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001311
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001312- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1313 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1314 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1315 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1316 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1317 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1318 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1319 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1320 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1321 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1322 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1323
1324 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1325 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1326 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1327 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1328 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1329 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1330 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1331
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001332- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1333 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1334
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001335- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001336 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001337
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001338- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001339 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001340 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1341
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001342- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001343 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1344 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1345
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001346- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1347 types that support garbage collection.
1348
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001349- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1350
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001351- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1352 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1353 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1354 Jython.
1355
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001356- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1357
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001358- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1359 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1360
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001361- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1362 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1363 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001364
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001365- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1366 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1367 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1368
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001369Extension modules
1370-----------------
1371
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001372- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1373
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001374Library
1375-------
1376
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001377- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1378 TIS-620
1379
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001380- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1381 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1382 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1383 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1384 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1385 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1386 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1387 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1388 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1389 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1390
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001391- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1392
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001393- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1394 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1395 same as when the argument is omitted).
1396 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1397
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001398- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1399
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001400- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1401 schemes are offered.
1402
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001403- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1404
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001405- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1406 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1407 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1408
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001409- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1410
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001411- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1412 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1413
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001414- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1415 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1416 when dummy_threading is being used.
1417
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001418- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1419 from a tarfile.
1420
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001421- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001422 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001423
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001424- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1425 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1426 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1427 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1428
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001429- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1430 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1431
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001432- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1433 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1434 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1435 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1436 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1437 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1438 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1439 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1440 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1441 by some other method in progress).
1442
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001443- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1444 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1445 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001446
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001447- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1448
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001449- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1450 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1451 AM Kuchling.
1452
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001453- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1454 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1455 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1456
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001457- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1458 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1459 instead of unsigned.
1460
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001461- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001462 no longer part of the public API.
1463
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001464- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1465 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1466 string methods of the same name).
1467
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001468- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001469 SF patch 945642.
1470
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001471- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1472
1473 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1474
1475 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1476 DocTestSuites.
1477
1478- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1479 that provide thread-local data.
1480
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001481- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1482 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1483
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001484- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1485
1486- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1487 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1488 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1489
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001490- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1491
1492 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1493 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1494 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001495
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001496 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1497 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1498 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1499 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1500
1501 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1502 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1503
1504 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1505 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1506 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1507 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1508
1509 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1510 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1511 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1512 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1513 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1514
1515 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1516 wrapping help output.
1517
1518 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1519 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1520 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001521
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001522C API
1523-----
1524
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001525- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1526 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1527 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1528 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1529 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1530 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1531 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1532 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1533 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1534 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1535 its visible semantics have not changed.
1536
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001537- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1538 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1539
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001540Documentation
1541-------------
1542
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001543- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001544
1545 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001546 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001547
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001548 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001549
1550 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1551
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001552- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001553
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001554Tests
1555-----
1556
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001557- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001558 platforms that use the Makefile.
1559
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001560- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1561 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1562 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1563
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001564
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001565What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1566=================================
1567
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001568*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001569
1570Core and builtins
1571-----------------
1572
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001573- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1574 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1575 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1576 objects now (one object instead of three).
1577
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001578- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1579 Windows DLLs.
1580
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001581- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1582 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001583
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001584- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1585 a new .pyc magic.
1586
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001587- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1588 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1589 be there.
1590
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001591- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1592 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1593 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1594
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001595- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1596 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1597 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1598
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001599- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1600
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001601- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1602 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1603 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001604
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001605- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1606 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1607
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001608- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1609
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001610- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001611 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001612
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001613- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1614
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001615- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1616
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001617- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1618 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1619
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001620- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1621 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1622 Fixes bug #858016 .
1623
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001624- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1625 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1626 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1627
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001628- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1629 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1630 improves their performance (about 35%).
1631
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001632- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1633 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1634 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1635
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001636- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1637 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1638 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1639 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1640
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001641- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1642 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001643 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001644 length is not known).
1645
1646- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1647 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001648 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1649 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001650 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1651
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001652- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1653 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1654
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001655- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1656 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1657 keyword arguments.
1658
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001659- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1660 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1661 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1662
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001663- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1664 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1665 cases.
1666
1667- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1668 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1669 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1670 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1671 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1672 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1673 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1674 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1675 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1676 a release build.
1677
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001678- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1679 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1680
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001681- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001682 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001683
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001684- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1685 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1686 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1687 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1688 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1689 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1690 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1691 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1692 destroyed.
1693
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001694- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1695 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1696 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1697 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1698 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1699 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1700 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1701 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1702
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001703- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1704 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1705 character other than a space.
1706
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001707- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1708 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1709 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1710 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1711 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1712 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1713 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1714 attributes with the same name.
1715
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001716- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1717 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1718 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1719 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1720 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1721 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1722 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1723 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1724 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1725 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1726 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1727 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1728 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1729 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001730
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001731- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1732 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1733 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1734 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1735 This has been repaired.
1736
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001737- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1738
1739- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1740
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001741- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1742 over a sequence.
1743
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001744- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001745 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001746
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001747- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1748
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001749- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1750 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1751 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1752 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1753 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1754 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1755 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1756 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1757
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001758- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1759 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1760 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1761
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001762- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1763 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1764 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1765 freelist.
1766
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001767- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1768 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1769
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001770- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1771 number.
1772
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001773- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1774 a TypeError exception.
1775
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001776- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1777 820195.
1778
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001779- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1780 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1781 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1782
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001783- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001784 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1785 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001786
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001787- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1788 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1789 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1790
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001791- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1792 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001793 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001794
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001795- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001796 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1797 the first call.
1798
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001799
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001800Extension modules
1801-----------------
1802
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001803- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1804 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1805
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001806- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1807 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1808 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1809 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1810 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1811 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1812 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001813
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001814- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1815
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001816- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1817
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001818- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1819 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1820
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001821- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1822 fewer false positives.
1823
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001824- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1825 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1826
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001827- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001828 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1829
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001830- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001831 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001832 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001833 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1834 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001835
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001836- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1837 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1838 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1839 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1840
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001841- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1842 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1843 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1844 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1845 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1846 #897625.
1847
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001848- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1849 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1850
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001851- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1852 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1853 and pops on either side of the deque.
1854
1855- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1856 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1857
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001858- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1859 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1860 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1861 other functions that expect a function argument.
1862
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001863- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1864
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001865- os.getsid was added.
1866
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001867- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1868 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1869 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1870
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001871- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1872
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001873- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1874
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001875- readline.clear_history was added.
1876
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001877- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1878
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001879- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1880
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001881- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1882
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001883- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1884
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001885- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1886
1887- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1888
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001889- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1890
1891- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1892
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001893- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1894 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1895 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1896
1897- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1898 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1899 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1900 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1901 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1902 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1903 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1904
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001905- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1906 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1907 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1908 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001909
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001910- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001911 iterators from a single iterable.
1912
1913- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1914 of raising a TypeError exception.
1915
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001916- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1917 as parameter.
1918
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001919Library
1920-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001921
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001922- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1923
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001924- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1925 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1926 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001927
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001928- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1929 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1930 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001931
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001932- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001933
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001934- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1935 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001936
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001937- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1938 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1939
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001940- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1941
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001942- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001943 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001944
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001945- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001946 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001947
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001948- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1949
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001950- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1951 on cygwin and mingw32.
1952
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001953- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1954
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001955- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1956 module.
1957
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001958- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1959 installation scheme for all platforms.
1960
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001961- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001962 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001963
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001964- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1965 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1966 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1967
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001968- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1969 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1970 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1971
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001972- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1973
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001974- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1975
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001976- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1977 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1978
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001979- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1980 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1981 type pattern with the same value exists.
1982
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001983- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1984 when run from the command prompt).
1985
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001986- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1987 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1988
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001989- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1990 default sort).
1991
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001992- Added global runctx function to profile module
1993
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001994- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1995
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001996- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1997
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001998- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1999
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002000- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002001 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2002 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2003 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2004 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2005 accordingly.
2006
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002007- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2008 decoding standards.
2009
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002010- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2011 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2012 called for all requests.
2013
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002014- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2015 they are passed to the compiler.
2016
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002017- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2018 indent, width and depth.
2019
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002020- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2021 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2022
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002023- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2024 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2025
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002026- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2027
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002028- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2029
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002030- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2031
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002032- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2033 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2034
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002035- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002036 for better performance.
2037
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002038- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002039
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002040- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2041 a string).
2042
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002043- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2044
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002045- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2046
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002047- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2048
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002049- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2050
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002051- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2052 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2053 list of fieldnames.
2054
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002055- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2056 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2057
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002058- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2059
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002060- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2061 empty lists.
2062
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002063- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2064 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2065 and shelves.
2066
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002067- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2068 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2069
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002070- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002071 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2072 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002073
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002074- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2075 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002076 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002077
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002078- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002079 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2080 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2081
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002082- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2083 and removed in Py2.4.
2084
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002085- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2086
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002087- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2088
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002089Tools/Demos
2090-----------
2091
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002092- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2093 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2094
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002095- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2096
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002097- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2098 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2099 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2100 destination in situations where both files are given.
2101
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002102- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2103 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2104 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2105 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2106
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002107- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2108
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002109- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2110 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2111 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2112 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2113 now.
2114
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002115- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2116 in effect
2117
2118- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2119 C-c C-h
2120
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002121- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2122 -d option was given.
2123
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002124Build
2125-----
2126
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002127- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2128 build under OS X.
2129
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002130- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2131 --enable-profiling.
2132
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002133- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2134 is configured --with-tsc.
2135
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002136- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2137 on AMD64.
2138
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002139- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2140 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2141
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002142- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2143 removed.
2144
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002145- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2146 supported (see PEP 11).
2147
2148- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2149
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002150- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2151
2152- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2153 (see PEP 11).
2154
2155- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2156 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2157
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002158C API
2159-----
2160
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002161- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2162 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2163 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2164
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002165- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2166 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2167 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2168 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2169
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002170- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2171 generator objects.
2172
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002173- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2174 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002175 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2176 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002177
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002178- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2179 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2180
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002181- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2182 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2183 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2184 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2185 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2186
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002187- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2188 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2189 about 10% faster.
2190
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002191- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2192 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2193
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002194- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2195 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2196 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2197 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2198
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002199Windows
2200-------
2201
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002202- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2203 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2204 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2205 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2206
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002207- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2208 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2209 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2210
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002211
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002212What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2213===============================
2214
2215*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2216
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002217IDLE
2218----
2219
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002220- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2221 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2222 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2223 context-menu actions.
2224
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002225- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2226 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2227 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2228 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2229 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2230 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2231 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2232 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2233 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2234
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002235
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002236What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2237=============================================
2238
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002239*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002240
2241Core and builtins
2242-----------------
2243
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002244- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002245 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002246 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2247
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002248Extension modules
2249-----------------
2250
2251- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2252 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2253 than once. This has been fixed.
2254
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002255- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2256 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2257 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2258 call.
2259
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002260- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2261
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002262Library
2263-------
2264
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002265- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2266 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2267
2268- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2269 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2270 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2271 restored.
2272
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002273IDLE
2274----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002275
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002276- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002277
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002278Build
2279-----
2280
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002281- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2282 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2283
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002284C API
2285-----
2286
2287Windows
2288-------
2289
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002290- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2291 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2292
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002293- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2294
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002295Mac
2296---
2297
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002298- Various fixes to pimp.
2299
2300- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2301
2302- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2303 more problems than it solves.
2304
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002305
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002306What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2307=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002308
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002309*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2310
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002311Core and builtins
2312-----------------
2313
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002314- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2315 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2316
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002317- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2318 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002319 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002320
2321- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2322 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2323 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002324 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002325
2326- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2327 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002328
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002329- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2330 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2331 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2332
2333- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002334 770247.
2335
2336- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002337
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002338Extension modules
2339-----------------
2340
2341- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2342 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2343
2344- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2345
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002346- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2347
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002348- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2349 contained within the _strptime module.
2350
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002351- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2352 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2353
2354- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002355 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2356
2357- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2358 the find_class attribute, if present.
2359
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002360- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002361
2362 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2363 (SF bug 763298).
2364
2365 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002366 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2367 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2368 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002369
2370 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2371
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002372Library
2373-------
2374
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002375- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2376
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002377- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2378 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2379 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2380 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2381 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2382 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2383 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2384 or Tester().
2385
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002386- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2387 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2388 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2389 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2390 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2391 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2392 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2393 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2394 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002395
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002396 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002397
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002398- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2399 weren't before was an oversight.
2400
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002401- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2402 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2403
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002404- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2405 when there are no lines.
2406
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002407- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2408 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2409
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002410- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2411 to child processes.
2412
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002413- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2414
2415- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2416
2417- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2418 xmlrpclib.
2419
2420- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2421 responses.
2422
2423- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2424 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2425
2426- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2427 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2428 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2429
2430- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2431 used as patterns.
2432
2433- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2434 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2435 than Tk 8.3.
2436
2437- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2438
2439- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002440
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002441Tools/Demos
2442-----------
2443
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002444- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2445
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002446- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2447
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002448- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002449
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002450Build
2451-----
2452
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002453- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2454
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002455- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2456
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002457- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2458 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002459
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002460- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2461 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2462 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002463
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002464C API
2465-----
2466
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002467- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2468 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2469
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002470Windows
2471-------
2472
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002473- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2474 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2475 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2476 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2477 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2478 Python exception ::
2479
2480 thread.error: can't start new thread
2481
2482 is raised now.
2483
2484- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2485 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2486 instead of from DLL teardown.
2487
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002488Mac
2489---
2490
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002491- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002492 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002493 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2494 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2495 the executable in the bundle.
2496
2497- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002498
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002499- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2500
2501- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2502 on Panther.
2503
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002504What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2505================================
2506
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002507*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002508
2509Core and builtins
2510-----------------
2511
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002512- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2513 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2514 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2515 with the -i option.
2516
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002517- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2518 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2519
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002520- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2521 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2522
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002523- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2524 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2525 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2526 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2527 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2528 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2529 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2530 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2531 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2532 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2533 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2534 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2535 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002536
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002537- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2538 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2539 embedded in a lambda expression.
2540
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002541- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2542 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2543 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2544 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2545 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2546
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002547- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2548 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2549 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2550
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002551- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2552 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2553
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002554- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2555 It's writable again.
2556
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002557- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2558 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2559 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002560 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002561
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002562- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2563 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2564 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2565
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002566Extension modules
2567-----------------
2568
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002569- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2570 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2571
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002572- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2573 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2574 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2575 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2576
2577- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2578 collection.
2579
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002580- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2581 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2582 unique within a single program run.
2583
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002584- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2585 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2586
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002587- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2588 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2589
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002590- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2591 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002592
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002593- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2594
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002595- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2596 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2597
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002598- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2599 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2600 for many BSD-derived systems.
2601
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002602
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002603Library
2604-------
2605
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002606- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2607 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2608 primary ones:
2609
2610 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2611 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2612 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2613
2614 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2615 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2616 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2617 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2618 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2619 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2620
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002621- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2622 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2623 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2624 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2625 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2626 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2627 argument.
2628
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002629- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2630 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2631 in the archive.
2632
2633- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2634 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2635
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002636- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2637 569574).
2638
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002639- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2640 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2641 no more.
2642
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002643- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2644 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2645 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2646 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2647 code coverage.
2648
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002649- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2650 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2651 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002652 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2653 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002654
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002655- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2656 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2657 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002658 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002659
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002660- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2661
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002662- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2663 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2664 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2665 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2666
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002667- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2668 handling.
2669
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002670- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2671 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2672
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002673- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2674 in socket.py.
2675
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002676- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2677
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002678- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2679 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2680 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2681 opener with proxy support.
2682
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002683- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2684
2685- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2686
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002687Tools/Demos
2688-----------
2689
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002690- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2691
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002692- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2693
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002694- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2695 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002696
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002697- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2698 files.
2699
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002700Build
2701-----
2702
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002703- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002704 different root directory.
2705
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002706C API
2707-----
2708
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002709- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2710 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2711 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2712 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2713 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2714 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2715 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2716 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2717 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2718 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2719
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002720- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2721 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2722 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2723 from Python.
2724
2725
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002726New platforms
2727-------------
2728
2729None this time.
2730
2731Tests
2732-----
2733
2734- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2735 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2736
2737Windows
2738-------
2739
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002740- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2741
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002742- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2743 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2744 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2745 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2746 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2747 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2748 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2749 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2750 that's what it's for.
2751
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002752Mac
2753---
2754
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002755- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2756 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2757 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2758 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002759- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2760 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2761- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002762
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002763SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2764------------------------------------
2765
2766430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2767598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2768622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2769661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2770683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2771697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2772713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2773724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2774727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2775729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2776730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2777731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2778732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2779733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2780735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2781740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2782744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2783745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2784747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2785749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2786751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2787753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2788755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2789757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2790760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2791
2792
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002793What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2794================================
2795
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002796*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002797
2798Core and builtins
2799-----------------
2800
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002801- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2802 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2803
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002804- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2805 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2806 and cannot be strings).
2807
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002808- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2809 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2810 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2811 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2812
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002813- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2814 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2815 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2816 Python itself.
2817
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002818- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2819 the referenced object, if it has one.
2820
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002821- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2822 the thread started at
2823 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2824
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002825- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2826 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2827 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2828 placed on a list index.
2829
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002830- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2831 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2832 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2833 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2834
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002835- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2836 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2837 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2838 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2839 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2840 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2841 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2842
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002843- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2844 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2845 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2846 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2847 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2848
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002849- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2850 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002851
2852- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2853 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2854 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2855 #693195.)
2856
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002857- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2858 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002859
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002860- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002861 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002862 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2863 interpreter executions, would fail.
2864
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002865- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002866 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002867 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002868
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002869Extension modules
2870-----------------
2871
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002872- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2873 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2874 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2875 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2876
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002877- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2878 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2879
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002880- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2881 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2882 and Greg Chapman.)
2883
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002884- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2885 recursively.
2886
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002887- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002888 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2889 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2890 leaks.
2891
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002892- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2893
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002894- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2895 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2896 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2897 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2898 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2899 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2900 #705836.
2901
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002902- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002903 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2904
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002905- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2906 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2907 See SF bug #692416.
2908
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002909- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2910 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2911
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002912- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2913 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2914 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002915
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002916- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002917 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2918 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2919
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002920- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2921 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2922 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2923 timeouts to work properly.
2924
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002925Library
2926-------
2927
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002928- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2929 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2930 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2931 future release.
2932
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002933- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2934 for querying platform dependent features.
2935
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002936- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002937
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002938- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2939 pickle protocol versions.
2940
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002941- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2942 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2943 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2944
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002945- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2946
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002947- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2948 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2949 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2950 modules.
2951
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002952- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2953 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2954 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2955
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002956- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2957 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2958
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002959- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2960 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2961 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2962
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002963- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002964 MS Office extensions.
2965
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002966- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2967 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2968
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002969- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2970 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2971
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002972- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2973 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2974 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2975 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2976 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2977 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2978
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002979- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2980 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2981 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002982
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002983- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2984 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2985 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2986
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002987- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2988
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002989- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2990 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2991 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2992
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002993Tools/Demos
2994-----------
2995
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002996- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2997 See the module docstring for details.
2998
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002999Build
3000-----
3001
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003002- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3003 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003004
3005C API
3006-----
3007
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003008- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3009
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003010- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3011 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3012 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3013
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003014- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3015 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003016
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003017 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3018 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3019 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003020
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003021- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003022 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3023
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003024- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3025 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3026 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003027
3028New platforms
3029-------------
3030
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003031None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003032
3033Tests
3034-----
3035
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003036- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3037 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003038
3039Windows
3040-------
3041
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003042- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3043 function.
3044
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003045- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3046 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003047
3048Mac
3049---
3050
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003051- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3052 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003053
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003054- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3055 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003056
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003057- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3058 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3059 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003060
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003061- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003062 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3063 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003064
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003065- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3066 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003067
3068
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003069What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3070=================================
3071
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003072*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003073
3074Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003075-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003076
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003077- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3078 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3079 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3080
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003081- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3082 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3083 (SF patch #664376.)
3084
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003085- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3086 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3087 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3088 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3089 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3090 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003091 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003092
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003093- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3094 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3095 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3096 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003097 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003098
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003099- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3100 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3101 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3102 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3103 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3104 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3105 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3106 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3107 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3108 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3109 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3110
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003111- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3112 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3113 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3114 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3115 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3116 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3117
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003118- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3119 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3120
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003121- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3122 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3123 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3124 case.)
3125
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003126- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3127 passed as unicode strings.
3128
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003129- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3130 See SF bug #683467.
3131
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003132- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3133 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3134
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003135- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3136
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003137- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3138
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003139- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3140 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3141 arguments.
3142
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003143- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3144 See SF bug #667147.
3145
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003146- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003147 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003148 See SF bug #676155.
3149
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003150- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003151 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003152 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3153 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3154 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3155 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3156 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3157 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003158
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003159Extension modules
3160-----------------
3161
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003162- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3163 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3164 tp_as_number pointer.
3165
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003166- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3167 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3168 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3169 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3170 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3171
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003172- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3173
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003174- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3175
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003176- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003177 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003178 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3179 patch #678531.)
3180
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003181- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3182 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3183
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003184- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3185 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3186
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003187- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3188
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003189- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3190 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3191 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3192
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003193- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3194
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003195- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3196 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3197
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003198- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003199
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003200- datetime changes:
3201
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003202 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3203
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003204 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3205 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3206 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3207 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3208 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3209 now.
3210
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003211 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003212 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3213 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003214
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003215 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003216 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003217 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3218 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3219 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3220 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003221
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003222 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3223 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3224 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003225 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3226
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003227 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3228 by a later example coded by Guido.
3229
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003230 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003231 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3232 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3233 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003234 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3235 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3236
3237 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3238 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3239 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3240 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3241 tzinfo subclass instance.
3242
3243 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3244 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3245 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3246 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3247 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3248 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3249 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3250 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003251
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003252 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3253 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3254 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3255 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3256 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003257 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3258
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003259 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003260
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003261 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3262 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3263 as a naive datetime object.
3264
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003265 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3266 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3267 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3268
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003269 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3270 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3271 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3272 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3273 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3274 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3275 comparison.
3276
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003277 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3278 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3279 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3280 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003281 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003282
3283 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003284
3285 and ::
3286
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003287 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3288
3289 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3290 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3291 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3292 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3293
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003294 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3295 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3296 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3297 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3298 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3299
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003300 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3301 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003302 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3303 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003304
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003305Library
3306-------
3307
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003308- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3309 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3310
3311- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3312 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3313 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3314 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3315 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3316 See PEP 307 for details.
3317
3318- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3319 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3320
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003321- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3322 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003323 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003324 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3325 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003326 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003327
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003328- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3329 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3330
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003331- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3332 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3333 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3334
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003335- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3336
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003337- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3338 exception.
3339
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003340- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3341 class.
3342
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003343- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3344 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3345 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3346
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003347- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3348 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3349
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003350- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003351 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3352 See SF bug #659228.
3353
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003354- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3355 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3356 See SF patch #651082.
3357
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003358- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003359
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003360- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3361 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3362
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003363- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003364 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003365
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003366- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3367 DOS paths from other platforms.
3368
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003369Tools/Demos
3370-----------
3371
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003372- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3373 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3374 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3375 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3376 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3377 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3378 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3379 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3380 example:
3381
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003382 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3383 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003384
3385 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3386
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003387
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003388Build
3389-----
3390
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003391- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3392 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3393 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003394 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3395
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003396 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3397
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003398- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3399 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3400 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3401 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3402 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3403 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3404 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3405 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3406 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3407
3408- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3409 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3410 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3411 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3412
3413- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3414 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3415
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003416C API
3417-----
3418
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003419- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3420 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003421
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003422- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3423 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3424 tp_as_number pointer.
3425
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003426- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3427 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3428 (SF #681367)
3429
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003430- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3431 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3432 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3433 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003434
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003435Tests
3436-----
3437
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003438- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003439 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3440 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3441 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3442 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3443 pydoc.)
3444
3445- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3446
3447- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003448
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003449Windows
3450-------
3451
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003452- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3453 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3454 time).
3455
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003456- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3457 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3458
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003459- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3460 release without strong cryptography.
3461
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003462- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003463 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003464
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003465- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3466 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3467
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003468Mac
3469---
3470
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003471- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3472 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003473
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003474- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3475 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3476 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003477
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003478- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3479 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003480
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003481- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3482 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3483 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3484 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003485
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003486- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003487 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3488 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3489 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003490
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003491
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003492What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003493=================================
3494
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003495*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003497Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003498--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003499
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003500- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3501
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003502- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3503 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003504 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003505 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003506 a different meaning than before.
3507
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003508- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003509 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003510 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003511
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003512- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003513 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003514 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003515
3516- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3517 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3518 and deallocation.
3519
3520- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3521 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3522
3523- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3524 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3525 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3526 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3527 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3528
3529- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3530 now detected by the garbage collector.
3531
3532- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3533 [SF bug 519621]
3534
3535- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3536 identifier.
3537
3538- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3539 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3540 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3541 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3542 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3543 [SF bug 563060]
3544
3545- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3546 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3547 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3548 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3549 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3550
3551- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3552 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3553 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3554
3555- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3556
3557- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3558 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3559 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3560 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3561 state of the slots would be lost.)
3562
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003563Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003565
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003566- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003567 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3568 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3569 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3570 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003571 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3572 Jython 2.1.
3573
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003574- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003575 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003576 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3577 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3578 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3579 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3580 these, see PEP 302.
3581
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003582- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3583 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3584 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3585
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003586- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3587 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3588 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3589
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003590- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3591 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3592 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3593
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003594- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3595 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3596 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3597 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3598 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3599 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3600 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3601 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3602 releases or implementations.
3603
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003604- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003605 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3606 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003607
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003608- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3609 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3610
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003611- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3612 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3613 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3614
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003615- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3616 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3617
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003618- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3619 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003620 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3621 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003622
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003623- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3624 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3625 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3626 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3627 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3628
3629 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3630 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3631 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3632 pattern.
3633
3634 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3635 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3636 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3637 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3638
3639 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3640 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3641 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3642 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3643 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3644 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3645
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003646- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3647 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3648 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3649 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3650 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3651 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3652 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3653 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003654
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003655- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3656 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3657 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3658 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3659 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003660 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3661 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3662 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3663 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3664 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3665 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3666 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003667
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003668- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3669 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3670
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003671- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3672 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3673 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3674 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3675 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3676 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3677 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3678 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3679 to Zack Weinberg!
3680
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003681- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3682 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3683 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3684 type. This has been fixed now.
3685
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003686- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3687 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3688 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3689
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003690- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3691 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3692 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3693 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3694 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3695 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3696 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3697 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003698 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003699
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003700- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3701 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3702 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003703
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003704- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3705 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3706 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3707 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3708 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3709 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3710 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3711 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003712 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003713 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3714 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3715
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003716- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3717 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3718 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3719 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3720 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3721 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3722 this.)
3723
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003724- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3725 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003726 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003727 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003728 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3729 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003730 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3731 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003732
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003733- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3734 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3735 currently running.
3736
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003737- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3738 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3739 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3740 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3741
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003742- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3743 as directory names.
3744
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003745- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3746 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3747
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003748- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3749 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3750
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003751- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003752 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3753 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003754
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003755- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3756 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3757 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3758 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3759 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3760
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003761- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3762 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3763 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3764 removed.
3765
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003766- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3767 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3768 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3769
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003770- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3771 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3772 to __debug__.
3773
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003774- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3775 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3776 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3777
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003778- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3779 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3780 deprecated now.
3781
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003782- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3783 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3784 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003785
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003786- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3787 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3788 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3789 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3790 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003791
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003792- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3793 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3794
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003795- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3796 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3797 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003798 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003799 is backward compatible.
3800
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003801- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3802 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3803 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3804 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3805 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3806
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003807- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3808 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3809 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3810 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3811 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3812 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003813
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003814- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3815 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3816
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003817- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3818 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3819
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003820- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3821 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3822 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3823 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3824 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3825
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003826- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3827 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3828 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3829
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003830- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003831 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3832
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003833- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3834 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3835 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003836
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003837- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3838 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3839
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003840- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3841 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3842 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3843
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003844- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3845
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003846Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003847-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003848
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003849- Added three operators to the operator module:
3850 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3851 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3852 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3853
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003854- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3855
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003856- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3857 archives.
3858
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003859- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3860 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3861 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3862
3863 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3864
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003865- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3866 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3867 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003868 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003869
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003870- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3871 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3872 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3873 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003874 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3875 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3876 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3877 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003878
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003879- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3880 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003881
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003882- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3883
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003884- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3885 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3886
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003887- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3888 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3889 supported.
3890
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003891- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3892
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003893- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3894 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003895
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003896- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3897 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3898
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003899- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3900
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003901- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3902 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3903
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003904- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3905 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3906 functions but callable type objects.
3907
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003908- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003909 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003910 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003911
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003912- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3913 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003914
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003915- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3916 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003917
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003918- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3919 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3920 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3921 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3922
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003923- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3924 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003925
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003926- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3927 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3928 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3929 and __imul__.
3930
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003931- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003932 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3933 is called.
3934
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003935- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3936 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3937 interpreter was compiled.
3938
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003939- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3940 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3941 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003942 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003943 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3944 1, not 2.
3945
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003946- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3947 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3948 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3949 limit.
3950
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003951- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3952 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3953 bug #623464.
3954
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003955- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3956 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3957 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3958 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3959
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003960Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003962
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003963- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3964
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003965- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3966 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3967 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3968 with Python 2.3a2.
3969
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003970- os.path exposes getctime.
3971
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003972- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003973 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003974 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003975 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003976 unit tests of floating point results.
3977
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003978- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3979 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3980 has been increased.
3981
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003982- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3983 executed.
3984
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003985- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3986 postinstallation script.
3987
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003988- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3989 test the current module.
3990
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003991- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003992 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3993 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3994 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3995 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3996
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003997- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003998 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003999 Ward's Optik package.
4000
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004001- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4002 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4003 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4004 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4005
4006- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4007 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004008 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004009
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004010- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4011 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4012 shelf are binary pickles.
4013
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004014- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4015 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4016
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004017- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4018 modules are iterators now.
4019
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004020- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4021 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4022 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4023 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4024 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4025 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004026
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004027- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4028 with their entity value.
4029
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004030- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4031
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004032- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4033 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004034
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004035- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4036 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004037 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004038
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004039- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4040 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4041 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4042 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4043 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4044 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4045 main():
4046
4047 import locale
4048 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4049
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004050- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4051 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4052
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004053- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4054 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4055 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4056 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4057 to the new standard.
4058
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004059- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4060 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4061 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4062 an extension to the database.
4063
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004064- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4065 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4066 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4067 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004068 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004069
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004070- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004071 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004072
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004073- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4074 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4075 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4076 bounded integers.
4077
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004078- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4079 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4080 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4081 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4082 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4083 in existence.
4084
4085 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4086 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4087 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4088 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4089 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4090 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4091
4092 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4093 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4094 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4095 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4096
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004097- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4098 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4099 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4100
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004101- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4102
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004103- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4104 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4105 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4106 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4107
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004108- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4109 argument.
4110
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004111- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4112 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4113 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4114 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4115 [SF patch 560794].
4116
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004117- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4118 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4119 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004120 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4121 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4122 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004123
4124- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4125 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004126
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004127- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4128 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4129 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4130 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004131
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004132- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4133 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4134 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4135 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4136 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4137
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004138- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004139
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004140- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4141
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004142- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4143 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4144 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4145 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4146 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4147 identical to None.
4148
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004149- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4150 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4151 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4152 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4153 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4154 results now.
4155
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004156- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4157 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4158
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004159- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4160 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4161 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4162 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4163 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4164 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4165 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4166 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4167
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004168- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4169
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004170- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4171 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4172
4173- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4174 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4175 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4176 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4177 and other systems.
4178
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004179- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4180 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4181 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4182 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 +00004183 work well with these.
4184
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004185- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4186
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004187- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004188 connections.
4189
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004190- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4191 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4192 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4193
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004194- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4195 sets
4196
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004197- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4198 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4199 name.
4200
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004201- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4202 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4203 passed in.
4204
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004205- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004206 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004207 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4208 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004209
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004210- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4211
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004212- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4213
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004214- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4215 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4216 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4217
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004218- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4219 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4220 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4221 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004222 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004223
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004224- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004225 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004226 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004227
4228- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4229 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4230 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4231
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004232- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004233 the value of its expression argument.
4234
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004235- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4236 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4237 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4238
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004239- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4240 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4241 skipstone browser was included.
4242
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004243- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4244 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4245
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004246Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004248
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004249- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4250 names in addition to accepting file names.
4251
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004252- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4253 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4254 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4255 still used and useful.)
4256
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004257- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4258 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4259 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4260 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004261
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004262- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4263 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4264 the generated binary.
4265
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004266Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004268
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004269- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4270
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004271- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4272 except in the hands of experts.
4273
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004274- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004275 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4276 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4277 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004278
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004279- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4280 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4281 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4282 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4283 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4284 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4285 builds.
4286
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004287- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4288 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4289 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4290 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4291 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4292 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4293 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4294 new type.
4295
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004296- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004297
4298 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4299 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4300 positive infinities.
4301
4302 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4303 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4304 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4305 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4306 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4307 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4308 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4309
4310 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4311
4312 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4313
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004314- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4315 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4316 size of the executable.
4317
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004318- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4319 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4320 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4321 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004322
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004323- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4324
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004325- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4326 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4327 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004328
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004329- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4330 well as Unix.
4331
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004332- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4333 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4334 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4335 modules in the README file for details.
4336
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004337C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004339
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004340- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4341 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004342 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004343 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004344 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004345
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004346- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4347 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4348 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4349 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4350 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4351 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004352 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004353 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4354 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4355 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4356 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4357 aligned.)
4358
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004359- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4360 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4361 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4362
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004363- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4364 level.
4365
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004366- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4367 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4368 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4369 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4370 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4371
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004372- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4373 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4374 code.
4375
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004376- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4377 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4378 adjusting for negative indices.
4379
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004380- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4381 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4382 object.
4383
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004384- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4385 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4386 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4387
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004388- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4389 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004390
4391- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4392
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004393- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4394 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4395 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4396 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4397
4398- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4399
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004400- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004401
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004402- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004403 without going through the buffer API.
4404
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004406
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004407- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4408 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4409 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4410 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4411
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004412- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4413 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4414
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004415- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004416 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4417
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004418New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004420
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004421- OpenVMS is now supported.
4422
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004423- AtheOS is now supported.
4424
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004425- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4426
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004427- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4428
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004429Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-----
4431
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004432- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4433 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4434 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004435
4436Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004438
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004439- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4440 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4441 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4442 bugs.
4443 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004444 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004445 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4446 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004447 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004448
4449- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004450 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004451
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004452- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4453 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4454
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004455- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4456 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004457 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004458 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4459
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004460- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4461 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4462 use files" uninstall option).
4463
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004464- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4465
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004466- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4467 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4468
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004469- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4470 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4471 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4472
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004473- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4474 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4475 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4476 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4477 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004478 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4479 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4480 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004481
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004482- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004483 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004484 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4485 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4486 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4487 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4488 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4489 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4490 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4491 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4492 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4493 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4494 work around.
4495
4496- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4497 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4498 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4499 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4500 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4501 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4502 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4503 specified with O_CREAT too).
4504
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004505Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506----
4507
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004508- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004509
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004510- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4511 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4512 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4513
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004514- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4515 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4516 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4517
4518- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4519 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4520 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4521 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4522 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4523 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4524 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4525 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004526
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004527- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4528 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4529 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004530
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004531- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4532 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4533 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4534 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4535 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004536
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004537- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4538 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4539 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004540
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004541- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4542 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004543
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004544- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4545 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4546 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4547 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4548 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004549
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004550- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4551 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4552 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4553
4554- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4555 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4556 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004557
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004558- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4559 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4560 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4561 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004562 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004563
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004564- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4565 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004566
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004567- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4568 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004569
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004570- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004571 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004572 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4573 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004574
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004575
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004576What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004577===============================
4578
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4580
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004581Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004583
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004584- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4585 with a custom metaclass.
4586
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004587Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004589
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004590- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4591 are proxies.
4592
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004593Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004595
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004596- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4597 very short strings.
4598
4599- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4600 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4601 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4602 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4603 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4604
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004605Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004607
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004608- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4609 close or delete time).
4610
4611- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4612 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4613
4614- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4615
4616- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004617 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004618
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004619Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004621
4622Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004624
4625C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004627
4628New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004630
4631Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004633
4634Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004636
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004637- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4638
4639- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4640 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4641
4642- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4643 deleted at process exit time.
4644
4645- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4646 in backslash.
4647
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004648Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004650
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004651- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4652 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4653 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4654
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004655
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004656What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004657===========================
4658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4660
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004661Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004663
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004664- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4665 been extensively updated. See
4666
4667 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4668
4669 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4670
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004671- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4672 deleted!
4673
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004674- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4675 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4676 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4677 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4678 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4679
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004680- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4681
4682 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4683 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4684
4685 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4686 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4687 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4688 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4689 supported anyway.
4690
4691 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4692 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4693
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004694- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4695 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4696 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4697 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4698 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004699
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004700- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4701 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4702 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4703
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004704Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004705-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004706
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004707- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4708 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4709 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4710 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4711 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4712 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004713 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4714 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4715 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4716 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004717
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004718- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4719 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4720 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4721
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004722Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004724
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004725- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4726
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004727Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004729
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004730- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4731 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4732 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4733 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4734 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4735 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4736
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004737- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4738
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004739- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4740
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004741- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4742
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004743- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4744 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4745 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4746
4747- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4748
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004749Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004751
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004752- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4753 off a search on Google.
4754
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004755Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004757
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004758- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4759 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4760 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4761 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4762 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4763 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4764 other platforms should do likewise.
4765
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004766- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4767 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4768 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4769
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004770C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004772
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004773- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4774 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4775 producing key-value pairs.
4776
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004777- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004778 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004779 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4780 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4781 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4782 previously went unchallenged.
4783
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004784New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004786
4787Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004789
4790Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004792
4793Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004795
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004796- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4797 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004798
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004799- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4800 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4801 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4802 home.
4803
4804
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004805What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004806===========================
4807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4809
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004810Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004812
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004813- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4814 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004815
4816 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004817 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004818
4819 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4820 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004821 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004822 This needs to be documented.
4823
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004824- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4825 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4826
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004827- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4828 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4829 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4830
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004831- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4832 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4833
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004834- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4835 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4836 class forbids it).
4837
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004838- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4839 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4840 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4841
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004842- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4843
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004844Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004846
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004847- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4848 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004849 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004850
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004851- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4852 (like 1 + '').
4853
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004854Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004856
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004857- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4858 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4859 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4860 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004861 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004862 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4863
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004864- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4865 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4866 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4867 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4868
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004869- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4870 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004871 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4872 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4873 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004874
4875- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4876 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004877
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004878- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4879 bytes on its input.
4880
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004881Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004883
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004884- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004885 convenience function.
4886
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004887- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4888 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4889 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004890 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4891 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4892 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4893 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4894 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4895 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004896
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004897- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4898 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4899 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4900 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4901
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004902- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4903 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4904 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4905
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004906- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4907 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4908 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4909 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4910
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004911- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4912 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004914 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4915 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4916 new -l and -e options.
4917
4918- statcache is now deprecated.
4919
4920- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4921 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004923 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4924 time properly taken into account.
4925
4926- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4927 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4928 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4929 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4930
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004931Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004933
4934Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004936
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004937- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4938 is built with libdb3 if available.
4939
4940- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4941
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004942C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004944
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004945- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4946 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4947 PySequence_Size().
4948
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004949- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4950
4951- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4952 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4953 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4954
4955- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4956 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4957
4958- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4959 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4960
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004961New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004962-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004963
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004964- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4965 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4966
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004967- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4968 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4969
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004970- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4971
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004972Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004973-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004974
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004975- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4976 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4977
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004978Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004979-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004980
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004981Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004982----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004983
4984- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4985 removed completely in the next release.
4986
4987- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4988 OSX.
4989
4990- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4991 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4992
4993- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004995
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004996What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004997===========================
4998
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5000
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005001Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005003
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005004- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005005 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005006 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005007 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5008 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005009 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5010 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005011 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5012 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005013
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005014- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5015 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5016
5017- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5018 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5019
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005020Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005022
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005023- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5024 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5025 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5026 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5027 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5028 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5029 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5030 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5031
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005032- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5033 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5034 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5035 example).
5036
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005037- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005038 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005039 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005040 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005041
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005042- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5043 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5044 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005045 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005046
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005047- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5048 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5049 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5050 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5051 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5052 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5053
5054 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5055
5056 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5057
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005058Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005060
5061- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5062
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005063- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5064
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005065- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5066 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005067
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005068- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5069 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5070 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5071 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5072 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5073 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005074 attributes.
5075
5076- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5077 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5078 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005079
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005080- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5081 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5082 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005083
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005084- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5085 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5086 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005087 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5088 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5089
5090- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5091 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005092
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005095
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005096- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5097 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5098
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005099- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5100 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5101 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5102 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5103
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005104- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5105 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5106 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5107 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5108
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005109 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5110 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5111 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5112 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5113 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5114 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5115 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5116 without losing information).
5117
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005118- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005119 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5120 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5121 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5122 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5123 module).
5124
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005125 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005126 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5127 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5128 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5129 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005130
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005131- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005132 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5133 encoding.
5134
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005135- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5136 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5137
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005138- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005139 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5140
5141- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5142 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5143 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5144 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5145
5146- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5147
5148- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5149 ON, and OFF.
5150
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005151- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5152 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5153
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005154Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005156
5157- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5158 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5159 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005160
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005161- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5162 been added: -X and -E.
5163
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005164Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005166
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005167- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5168 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5169
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005170C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005172
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005173- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5174 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5175 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5176 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5177 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5178
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005179- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5180 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5181 as long) arguments.
5182
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005183- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5184 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5185 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5186 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5187 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5188 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5189
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005190- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5191 input.
5192
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005193New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005195
5196Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005198
5199Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005201
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005202- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5203 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5204 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5205
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005206- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5207 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5208 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005209 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5212 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5213 import signal
5214 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005217 while 1:
5218 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005220 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5221 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5222 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5223 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005224
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005225
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005226What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5227===========================
5228
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5230
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005231Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005233
5234- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5235 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5236 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5237
5238- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5239 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5240 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5241 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5242 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5243 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5244 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005245
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005246- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005247 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005248 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5249 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5250 associate a docstring with a property.
5251
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005252- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5253 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5254 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5255 other built-in object types.
5256
5257- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5258 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5259 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5260 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5261 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5262
5263- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5264 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5265
5266- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5267 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005268 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005269 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5270 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5271 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5272 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5273 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5274
5275- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5276 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5277 class.
5278
5279- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5280 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5281 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5282 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5283
5284- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5285 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5286 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5287 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5288
5289- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5290 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5291
5292- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5293 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5294 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5295 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5296 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005297 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005298 with the same value as s.
5299
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005300- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5301
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005302Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005304
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005305- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5306
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005307- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5308 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5309 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5310 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5311 objects.
5312
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005313- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5314 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005315 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5316 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5317
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005318- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5319 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5320 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5321
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005322Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005324
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005325- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5326 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5327 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5328 by the instances.
5329
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005330- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5331 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5332 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5333
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005334- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5335 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5336 before the entire comparison is complete.
5337
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005338- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5339 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5340 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5341
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005342- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5343 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5344 getwriter().
5345
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005346- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5347 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5348
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005349- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005350 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5351 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5352
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005353- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5354 iterable object.
5355
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005356- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5357 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005358
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005359- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5360 authentication.
5361
5362- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5363 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005364
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005365- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005366 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5367 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5368 a sample driver.)
5369
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005370Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005371-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005372
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005373- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5374 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5375 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5376 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5377 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5378 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5379 kernel has large file support.
5380
5381- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5382 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5383 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5384 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5385 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5386
5387- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5388 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5389 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5390
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005391C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005392-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005393
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005394- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5395 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5396
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005397New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005398-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005399
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005400- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5401 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5402
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005403Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005404-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005405
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005406- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5407 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5408 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5409 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5410 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5411
5412- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5413 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5414 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5415 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5416
5417- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5418 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5419
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005420Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005422
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005423- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005424 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5425 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005426
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005427
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005428What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5429===========================
5430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5432
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005433Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005434----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005435
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005436- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5437 big to represent as a C double.
5438
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005439- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5440 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5441 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5442 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5443 restriction).
5444
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005445- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5446 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5447 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5448 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5449 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5450
5451 >>> dir([])
5452 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5453 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5454 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5455 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5456 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5457 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5458 'reverse', 'sort']
5459
5460 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5461
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005462- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005463 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5464 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5465 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5466 OverflowError exception.
5467
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005468- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005469 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005470 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5471 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5472 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5473 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5474 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005475 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005476 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5477 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5478
5479 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5480 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5481 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5482 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005483
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005484- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005485 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5486 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5487 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5488 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5489 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5490 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5491 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5492 once it is created.
5493
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005494- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5495 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5496 (key, value) pairs.
5497
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005498- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005499 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5500 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5501
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005502- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5503 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5504 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5505 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5506 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005507
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005508- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005509 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5510 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5511
5512 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5513
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005514- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005515 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5516
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005517Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005519
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005520- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005521 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5522 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005523
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005524- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5525 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5526 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5527 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5528 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5529 in this area anymore).
5530
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005531- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5532 threading.Timer.
5533
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005534- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5535 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5536
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005537- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005538 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5539
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005540- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005541 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5542 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5543 converted to Python longs.
5544
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005545- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005546 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5547
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005548- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5549 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5550 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5551
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005552Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005553-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005554
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005555- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5556 division operators as per PEP 238.
5557
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005558Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005559-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005560
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005561- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5562 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5563 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5564 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5565
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005566C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005567-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005568
5569- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005570
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005571- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5572 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005573 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005574
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005575 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5576 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005577 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005578 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005579
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005580- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005581 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5582 module:
5583
5584 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005585
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005586 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5587 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005588
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005589 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5590 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005591
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005592 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5593
5594 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5595
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005596- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005597 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5598 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5599 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005600
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005601New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005602-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005603
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005604- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5605 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5606 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5607 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5608 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005609
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005610Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005611-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005612
5613Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005615
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005616- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5617 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5618 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5619 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005620 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5621 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5622 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5623 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5624 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005625
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005626- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005627 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5628
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005629
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005630What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5631===========================
5632
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005633*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5634
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005635Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005636-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005637
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005638- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5639 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5640
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005641- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5642 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5643 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005644
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005645- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5646 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5647 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5648 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005649
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005650- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5651
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005652- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005653
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005654Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005655-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005656
5657- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005658 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005659 the module docstring for details.
5660
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005661Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005662-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005663
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005664- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005665 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5666 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5667 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005668
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005669- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5670 Nick Mathewson.
5671
5672Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005673----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005674
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005675- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5676 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5677 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5678 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5679 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5680 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5681 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5682 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5683
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005684- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5685 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5686 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5687 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5688
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005689- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5690 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5691 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5692 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5693 come a long way).
5694
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005695- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5696 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5697 write filters for these warnings).
5698
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005699- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5700 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5701 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5702 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5703 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5704
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005705- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5706 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5707 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5708 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5709 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5710 older distribution.
5711
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005712Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005713-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005714
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005715- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5716 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005717 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005718
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005719- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5720 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5721 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5722
5723- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5724
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005725- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5726
5727- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5728
5729- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5730
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005731- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005732
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005733- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5734
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005735New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005736-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005737
5738C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005739-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005740
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005741- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5742 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5743 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5744 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5745 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5746 against buffer overruns.
5747
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005748- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005749 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5750 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005751 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5752 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5753 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5754
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005755- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5756 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5757 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5758 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5759 deprecated.
5760
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005762-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005763
5764- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5765 relevant is found.
5766
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005767
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005768What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005769===========================
5770
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005771*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5772
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005773Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005774----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005775
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005776- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5777 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5778 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5779 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5780 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5781 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5782 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5783 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005784 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005785 repaired.
5786
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005787- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005788 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005789 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5790 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5791 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5792 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5793 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5794 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5795 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5796 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5797
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005798- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5799 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5800 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5801 leading BMO character).
5802
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005803- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5804 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5805 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5806
5807 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5808 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5809 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005810
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005811 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5812 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5813 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5814 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5815 for various simple to use conversions.
5816
5817 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5818 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5819
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005820 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5821 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5822 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5823 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5824 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5825 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5826 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5827 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5828 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5829 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5830 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5831 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5832 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5833 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5834 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005835
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005836- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5837 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5838 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005839 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005840 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005841
5842 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005843 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5844 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5845 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5846 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5847 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005848 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5849 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005850
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005851 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5852 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5853 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005854 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005855
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005856- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5857 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5858 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5859 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5860 floating arithmetic,
5861
5862 x = 9007199254740992.0
5863 print long(x)
5864
5865 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5866 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5867 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5868 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5869 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5870 functions are of good quality).
5871
5872 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5873 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5874 algorithms to break.
5875
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005876- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5877 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5878 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5879 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5880 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5881 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5882 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5883 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5884 order.
5885
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005886- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5887 operation along the most common code paths.
5888
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005889- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5890 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5891
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005892- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5893 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5894 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5895 {}.update(UserDict())
5896
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005897- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5898 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5899 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5900 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5901 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5902 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5903 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5904 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5905
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005906- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005907 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005908
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005909 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005910 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5911 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005912 join() method of strings
5913 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005914 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5915 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005916 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005917 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005918
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005919- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5920 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5921
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005922- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5923 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5924
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005925- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5926 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5927 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5928 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5929
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005930- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5931 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005932 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005933 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5934 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005935
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005936- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5937
5938
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005939Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005940-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005941
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005942- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005943 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005944 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5945 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5946
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005947- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5948 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5949
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005950- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5951 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5952 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5953 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5954
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005955- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5956 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5957 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5958
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005959- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5960
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005961- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5962
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005963- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5964 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5965 that are still imported into string.py).
5966
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005967- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5968
5969- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5970 Now it does.
5971
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005972- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5973
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005974- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5975 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5976 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5977 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5978 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005979 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5980 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005981
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005982- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5983 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5984 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5985 'help(object)'.
5986
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005987Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005988-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005989
5990- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005991 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005992 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5993 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5994
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005995- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005996 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5997 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005998
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005999C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006000-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006001
6002- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6003 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006004
6005----
6006
6007**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**