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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000026- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
27 types that support garbage collection.
28
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000029Extension modules
30-----------------
31
32Library
33-------
34
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000035- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
36 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
37 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
38 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
39 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
40 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
41 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
42 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
43 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
44 by some other method in progress).
45
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000046- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
47 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
48 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000049
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000050- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
51
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000052- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
53 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
54 AM Kuchling.
55
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000056- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
57 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
58 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
59
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000060- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
61 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
62 instead of unsigned.
63
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000064- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000065 no longer part of the public API.
66
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000067- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
68 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
69 string methods of the same name).
70
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000071- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
72 SF patch 982681.
73
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000074- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000075 SF patch 945642.
76
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000077- doctest unittest integration improvements:
78
79 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
80
81 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
82 DocTestSuites.
83
84- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
85 that provide thread-local data.
86
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000087Tools/Demos
88-----------
89
90Build
91-----
92
93C API
94-----
95
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000096- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
97 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
98
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000099Documentation
100-------------
101
102Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
103
104 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
105 assigning thier values
106
107 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
108
109 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
110
111
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000112New platforms
113-------------
114
115Tests
116-----
117
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000118- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
119 platforms that use the Makefile.
120
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000121Windows
122-------
123
124Mac
125---
126
127
128
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000129What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
130=================================
131
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000132*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000133
134Core and builtins
135-----------------
136
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000137- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
138 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
139 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
140 objects now (one object instead of three).
141
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000142- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
143 Windows DLLs.
144
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000145- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
146
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000147- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
148 a new .pyc magic.
149
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000150- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
151 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
152 be there.
153
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000154- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
155 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
156 the LC_NUMERIC category.
157
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000158- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
159 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
160 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
161
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000162- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
163
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000164- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
165 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
166 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000167
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000168- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
169 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
170
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000171- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
172
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000173- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000174 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000175
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000176- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
177
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000178- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
179
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000180- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
181 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
182
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000183- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
184 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
185 Fixes bug #858016 .
186
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000187- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
188 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
189 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
190
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000191- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
192 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
193 improves their performance (about 35%).
194
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000195- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
196 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
197 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
198
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000199- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
200 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
201 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
202 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
203
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000204- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
205 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
206 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
207 length is not known).
208
209- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
210 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000211 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
212 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000213 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
214
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000215- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
216 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
217
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000218- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
219 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
220 keyword arguments.
221
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000222- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
223 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
224 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
225
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000226- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
227 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
228 cases.
229
230- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
231 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
232 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
233 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
234 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
235 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
236 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
237 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
238 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
239 a release build.
240
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000241- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
242 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
243
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000244- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000245 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000246
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000247- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
248 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
249 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
250 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
251 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
252 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
253 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
254 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
255 destroyed.
256
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000257- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
258 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
259 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
260 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
261 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
262 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
263 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
264 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
265
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000266- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
267 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
268 character other than a space.
269
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000270- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
271 by the function object or by the method object, the function
272 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
273 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
274 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
275 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
276 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
277 attributes with the same name.
278
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000279- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
280 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
281 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
282 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
283 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
284 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
285 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
286 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
287 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
288 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
289 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
290 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
291 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
292 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000293
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000294- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
295 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
296 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
297 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
298 This has been repaired.
299
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000300- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
301
302- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
303
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000304- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
305 over a sequence.
306
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000307- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000308 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000309
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000310- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
311
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000312- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
313 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
314 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
315 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
316 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
317 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
318 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
319 records with equal keys is unchanged).
320
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000321- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
322 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
323 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
324
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000325- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
326 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
327 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
328 freelist.
329
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000330- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
331 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
332
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000333- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
334 number.
335
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000336- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
337 a TypeError exception.
338
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000339- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
340 820195.
341
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000342- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
343 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
344 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
345
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000346- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000347 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
348 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000349
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000350- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
351 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
352 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
353
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000354- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
355 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000356 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000357
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000358- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000359 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
360 the first call.
361
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000362
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000363Extension modules
364-----------------
365
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000366- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
367 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
368
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000369- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
370 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
371 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
372 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
373 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
374 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
375 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000376
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000377- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
378
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000379- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
380
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000381- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
382 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
383
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000384- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
385 fewer false positives.
386
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000387- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
388 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
389
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000390- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000391 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
392
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000393- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000394 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000395 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
396 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
397 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000398
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000399- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
400 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
401 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
402 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
403
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000404- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
405 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
406 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
407 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
408 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
409 #897625.
410
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000411- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
412 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
413
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000414- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
415 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
416 and pops on either side of the deque.
417
418- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
419 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
420
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000421- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
422 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
423 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
424 other functions that expect a function argument.
425
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000426- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
427
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000428- os.getsid was added.
429
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000430- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
431 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
432 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
433
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000434- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
435
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000436- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
437
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000438- readline.clear_history was added.
439
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000440- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
441
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000442- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
443
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000444- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
445
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000446- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
447
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000448- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
449
450- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
451
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000452- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
453
454- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
455
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000456- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
457 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
458 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
459
460- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
461 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
462 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
463 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
464 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
465 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
466 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
467
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000468- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
469 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
470 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
471 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000472
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000473- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000474 iterators from a single iterable.
475
476- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
477 of raising a TypeError exception.
478
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000479- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
480 as parameter.
481
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000482Library
483-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000484
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000485- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
486 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
487 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000488
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000489- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
490 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
491 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000492
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000493- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000494
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000495- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
496 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000497
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000498- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
499 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
500
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000501- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
502
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000503- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000504 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000505
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000506- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
507 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
508
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000509- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
510
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000511- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
512 on cygwin and mingw32.
513
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000514- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
515
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000516- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
517 module.
518
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000519- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
520 installation scheme for all platforms.
521
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000522- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000523 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000524
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000525- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
526 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
527 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
528
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000529- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
530 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
531 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
532
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000533- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
534
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000535- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
536
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000537- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
538 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
539
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000540- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
541 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
542 type pattern with the same value exists.
543
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000544- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
545 when run from the command prompt).
546
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000547- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
548 not taken into consideration when caching value.
549
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000550- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
551 default sort).
552
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000553- Added global runctx function to profile module
554
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000555- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
556
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000557- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
558
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000559- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
560
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000561- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000562 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
563 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
564 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
565 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
566 accordingly.
567
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000568- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
569 decoding standards.
570
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000571- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
572 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
573 called for all requests.
574
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000575- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
576 they are passed to the compiler.
577
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000578- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
579 indent, width and depth.
580
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000581- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
582 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
583
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000584- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
585 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
586
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000587- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
588
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000589- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
590
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000591- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
592
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000593- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
594 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
595
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000596- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000597 for better performance.
598
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000599- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000600
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000601- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
602 a string).
603
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000604- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
605
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000606- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
607
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000608- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
609
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000610- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
611
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000612- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
613 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
614 list of fieldnames.
615
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000616- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
617 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
618
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000619- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
620
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000621- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
622 empty lists.
623
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000624- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
625 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
626 and shelves.
627
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000628- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
629 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
630
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000631- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000632 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
633 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000634
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000635- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
636 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000637 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000638
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000639- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000640 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
641 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
642
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000643- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
644 and removed in Py2.4.
645
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000646- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
647
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000648- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
649
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000650Tools/Demos
651-----------
652
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000653- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
654 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
655
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000656- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
657
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000658- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
659 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
660 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
661 destination in situations where both files are given.
662
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000663- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
664 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
665 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
666 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
667
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000668- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
669
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000670- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
671 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
672 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
673 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
674 now.
675
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000676- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
677 in effect
678
679- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
680 C-c C-h
681
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000682- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
683 -d option was given.
684
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000685Build
686-----
687
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000688- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
689 build under OS X.
690
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000691- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
692 --enable-profiling.
693
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000694- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
695 is configured --with-tsc.
696
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000697- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
698 on AMD64.
699
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000700- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
701 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
702
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000703- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
704 removed.
705
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000706- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
707 supported (see PEP 11).
708
709- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
710
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000711- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
712
713- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
714 (see PEP 11).
715
716- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
717 sizeof(char) must be 1.
718
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000719C API
720-----
721
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000722- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
723 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
724 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
725
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000726- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
727 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
728 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
729 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
730
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000731- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
732 generator objects.
733
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000734- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
735 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000736 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
737 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000738
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000739- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
740 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
741
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000742- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
743 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
744 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
745 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
746 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
747
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000748- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
749 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
750 about 10% faster.
751
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000752- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
753 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
754
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000755- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
756 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
757 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
758 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
759
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000760Windows
761-------
762
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000763- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
764 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
765 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
766 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
767
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000768- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
769 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
770 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
771
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000772
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000773What's New in Python 2.3 final?
774===============================
775
776*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
777
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000778IDLE
779----
780
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000781- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
782 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
783 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
784 context-menu actions.
785
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000786- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
787 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
788 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
789 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
790 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
791 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
792 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
793 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
794 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
795
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000796
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000797What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
798=============================================
799
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000800*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000801
802Core and builtins
803-----------------
804
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000805- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000806 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000807 comment at the end are still unsupported.
808
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000809Extension modules
810-----------------
811
812- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
813 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
814 than once. This has been fixed.
815
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000816- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
817 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
818 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
819 call.
820
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000821- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
822
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000823Library
824-------
825
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000826- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
827 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
828
829- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
830 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
831 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
832 restored.
833
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000834IDLE
835----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000836
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000837- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000838
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000839Build
840-----
841
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000842- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
843 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
844
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000845C API
846-----
847
848Windows
849-------
850
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000851- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
852 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
853
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000854- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
855
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000856Mac
857---
858
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000859- Various fixes to pimp.
860
861- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
862
863- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
864 more problems than it solves.
865
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000866
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000867What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
868=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000869
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000870*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
871
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000872Core and builtins
873-----------------
874
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000875- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
876 by sys.setcheckinterval().
877
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000878- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
879 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000880 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000881
882- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
883 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
884 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000885 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000886
887- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
888 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000889
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000890- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
891 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
892 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
893
894- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000895 770247.
896
897- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000898
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000899Extension modules
900-----------------
901
902- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
903 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
904
905- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
906
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000907- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
908
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000909- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
910 contained within the _strptime module.
911
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000912- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
913 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
914
915- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000916 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
917
918- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
919 the find_class attribute, if present.
920
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000921- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000922
923 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
924 (SF bug 763298).
925
926 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000927 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
928 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
929 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000930
931 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
932
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000933Library
934-------
935
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000936- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
937
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000938- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
939 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
940 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
941 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
942 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
943 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
944 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
945 or Tester().
946
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000947- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
948 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
949 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
950 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
951 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
952 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
953 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
954 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
955 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000956
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000957 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000958
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000959- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
960 weren't before was an oversight.
961
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000962- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
963 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
964
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000965- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
966 when there are no lines.
967
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000968- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
969 which could occur with Tk 8.4
970
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000971- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
972 to child processes.
973
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000974- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
975
976- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
977
978- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
979 xmlrpclib.
980
981- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
982 responses.
983
984- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
985 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
986
987- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
988 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
989 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
990
991- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
992 used as patterns.
993
994- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
995 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
996 than Tk 8.3.
997
998- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
999
1000- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001001
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001002Tools/Demos
1003-----------
1004
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001005- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1006
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001007- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1008
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001009- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001010
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001011Build
1012-----
1013
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001014- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1015
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001016- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1017
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001018- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1019 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001020
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001021- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1022 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1023 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001024
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001025C API
1026-----
1027
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001028- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1029 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1030
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001031Windows
1032-------
1033
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001034- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1035 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1036 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1037 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1038 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1039 Python exception ::
1040
1041 thread.error: can't start new thread
1042
1043 is raised now.
1044
1045- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1046 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1047 instead of from DLL teardown.
1048
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001049Mac
1050---
1051
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001052- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001053 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001054 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1055 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1056 the executable in the bundle.
1057
1058- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001059
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001060- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1061
1062- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1063 on Panther.
1064
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001065What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1066================================
1067
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001068*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001069
1070Core and builtins
1071-----------------
1072
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001073- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1074 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1075 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1076 with the -i option.
1077
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001078- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1079 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1080
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001081- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1082 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1083
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001084- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1085 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1086 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1087 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1088 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1089 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1090 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1091 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1092 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1093 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1094 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1095 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1096 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001097
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001098- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1099 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1100 embedded in a lambda expression.
1101
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001102- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1103 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1104 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1105 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1106 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1107
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001108- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1109 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1110 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1111
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001112- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1113 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1114
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001115- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1116 It's writable again.
1117
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001118- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1119 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1120 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001121 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001122
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001123- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1124 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1125 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1126
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001127Extension modules
1128-----------------
1129
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001130- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1131 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1132
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001133- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1134 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1135 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1136 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1137
1138- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1139 collection.
1140
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001141- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1142 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1143 unique within a single program run.
1144
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001145- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1146 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1147
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001148- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1149 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1150
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001151- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1152 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001153
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001154- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1155
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001156- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1157 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1158
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001159- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1160 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1161 for many BSD-derived systems.
1162
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001163
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001164Library
1165-------
1166
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001167- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1168 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1169 primary ones:
1170
1171 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1172 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1173 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1174
1175 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1176 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1177 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1178 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1179 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1180 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1181
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001182- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1183 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1184 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1185 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1186 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1187 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1188 argument.
1189
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001190- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1191 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1192 in the archive.
1193
1194- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1195 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1196
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001197- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1198 569574).
1199
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001200- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1201 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1202 no more.
1203
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001204- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1205 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1206 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1207 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1208 code coverage.
1209
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001210- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1211 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1212 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001213 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1214 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001215
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001216- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1217 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1218 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001219 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001220
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001221- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1222
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001223- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1224 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1225 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1226 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1227
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001228- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1229 handling.
1230
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001231- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1232 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1233
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001234- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1235 in socket.py.
1236
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001237- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1238
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001239- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1240 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1241 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1242 opener with proxy support.
1243
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001244- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1245
1246- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1247
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001248Tools/Demos
1249-----------
1250
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001251- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1252
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001253- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1254
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001255- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1256 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001257
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001258- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1259 files.
1260
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001261Build
1262-----
1263
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001264- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001265 different root directory.
1266
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001267C API
1268-----
1269
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001270- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1271 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1272 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1273 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1274 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1275 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1276 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1277 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1278 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1279 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1280
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001281- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1282 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1283 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1284 from Python.
1285
1286
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001287New platforms
1288-------------
1289
1290None this time.
1291
1292Tests
1293-----
1294
1295- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1296 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1297
1298Windows
1299-------
1300
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001301- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1302
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001303- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1304 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1305 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1306 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1307 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1308 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1309 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1310 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1311 that's what it's for.
1312
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001313Mac
1314---
1315
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001316- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1317 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1318 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1319 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001320- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1321 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1322- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001323
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001324SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1325------------------------------------
1326
1327430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1328598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1329622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1330661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1331683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1332697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1333713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1334724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1335727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1336729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1337730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1338731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1339732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1340733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1341735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1342740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1343744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1344745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1345747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1346749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1347751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1348753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1349755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1350757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1351760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1352
1353
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001354What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1355================================
1356
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001357*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001358
1359Core and builtins
1360-----------------
1361
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001362- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1363 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1364
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001365- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1366 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1367 and cannot be strings).
1368
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001369- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1370 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1371 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1372 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1373
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001374- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1375 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1376 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1377 Python itself.
1378
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001379- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1380 the referenced object, if it has one.
1381
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001382- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1383 the thread started at
1384 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1385
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001386- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1387 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1388 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1389 placed on a list index.
1390
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001391- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1392 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1393 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1394 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1395
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001396- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1397 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1398 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1399 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1400 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1401 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1402 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1403
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001404- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1405 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1406 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1407 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1408 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1409
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001410- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1411 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001412
1413- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1414 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1415 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1416 #693195.)
1417
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001418- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1419 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001420
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001421- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001422 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001423 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1424 interpreter executions, would fail.
1425
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001426- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001427 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001428 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001429
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001430Extension modules
1431-----------------
1432
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001433- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1434 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1435 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1436 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1437
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001438- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1439 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1440
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001441- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1442 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1443 and Greg Chapman.)
1444
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001445- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1446 recursively.
1447
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001448- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001449 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1450 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1451 leaks.
1452
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001453- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1454
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001455- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1456 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1457 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1458 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1459 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1460 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1461 #705836.
1462
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001463- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001464 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1465
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001466- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1467 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1468 See SF bug #692416.
1469
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001470- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1471 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1472
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001473- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1474 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1475 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001476
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001477- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001478 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1479 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1480
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001481- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1482 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1483 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1484 timeouts to work properly.
1485
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001486Library
1487-------
1488
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001489- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1490 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1491 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1492 future release.
1493
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001494- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1495 for querying platform dependent features.
1496
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001497- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001498
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001499- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1500 pickle protocol versions.
1501
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001502- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1503 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1504 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1505
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001506- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1507
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001508- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1509 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1510 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1511 modules.
1512
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001513- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1514 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1515 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1516
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001517- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1518 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1519
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001520- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1521 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1522 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1523
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001524- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001525 MS Office extensions.
1526
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001527- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1528 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1529
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001530- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1531 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1532
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001533- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1534 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1535 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1536 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1537 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1538 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1539
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001540- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1541 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1542 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001543
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001544- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1545 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1546 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1547
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001548- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1549
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001550- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1551 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1552 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1553
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001554Tools/Demos
1555-----------
1556
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001557- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1558 See the module docstring for details.
1559
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001560Build
1561-----
1562
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001563- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1564 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001565
1566C API
1567-----
1568
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001569- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1570
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001571- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1572 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1573 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1574
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001575- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1576 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001577
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001578 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1579 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1580 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001581
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001582- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001583 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1584
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001585- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1586 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1587 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001588
1589New platforms
1590-------------
1591
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001592None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001593
1594Tests
1595-----
1596
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001597- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1598 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001599
1600Windows
1601-------
1602
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001603- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1604 function.
1605
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001606- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1607 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001608
1609Mac
1610---
1611
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001612- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1613 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001614
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001615- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1616 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001617
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001618- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1619 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1620 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001621
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001622- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001623 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1624 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001625
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001626- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1627 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001628
1629
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001630What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1631=================================
1632
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001633*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001634
1635Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001636-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001637
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001638- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1639 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1640 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1641
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001642- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1643 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1644 (SF patch #664376.)
1645
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001646- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1647 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1648 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1649 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1650 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1651 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001652 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001653
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001654- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1655 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1656 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1657 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001658 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001659
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001660- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1661 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1662 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1663 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1664 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1665 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1666 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1667 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1668 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1669 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1670 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1671
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001672- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1673 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1674 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1675 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1676 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1677 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1678
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001679- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1680 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1681
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001682- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1683 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1684 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1685 case.)
1686
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001687- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1688 passed as unicode strings.
1689
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001690- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1691 See SF bug #683467.
1692
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001693- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1694 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1695
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001696- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1697
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001698- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1699
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001700- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1701 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1702 arguments.
1703
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001704- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1705 See SF bug #667147.
1706
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001707- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001708 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001709 See SF bug #676155.
1710
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001711- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001712 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001713 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1714 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1715 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1716 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1717 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1718 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001719
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001720Extension modules
1721-----------------
1722
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001723- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1724 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1725 tp_as_number pointer.
1726
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001727- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1728 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1729 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1730 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1731 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1732
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001733- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1734
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001735- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1736
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001737- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001738 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001739 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1740 patch #678531.)
1741
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001742- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1743 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1744
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001745- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1746 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1747
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001748- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1749
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001750- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1751 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1752 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1753
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001754- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1755
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001756- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1757 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1758
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001759- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001760
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001761- datetime changes:
1762
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001763 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1764
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001765 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1766 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1767 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1768 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1769 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1770 now.
1771
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001772 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001773 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1774 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001775
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001776 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001777 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001778 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1779 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1780 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1781 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001782
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001783 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1784 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1785 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001786 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1787
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001788 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1789 by a later example coded by Guido.
1790
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001791 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001792 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1793 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1794 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001795 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1796 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1797
1798 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1799 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1800 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1801 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1802 tzinfo subclass instance.
1803
1804 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1805 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1806 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1807 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1808 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1809 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1810 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1811 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001812
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001813 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1814 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1815 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1816 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1817 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001818 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1819
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001820 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001821
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001822 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1823 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1824 as a naive datetime object.
1825
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001826 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1827 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1828 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1829
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001830 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1831 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1832 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1833 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1834 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1835 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1836 comparison.
1837
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001838 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1839 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1840 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1841 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001842 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001843
1844 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001845
1846 and ::
1847
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001848 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1849
1850 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1851 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1852 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1853 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1854
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001855 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1856 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1857 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1858 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1859 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1860
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001861 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1862 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001863 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1864 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001865
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001866Library
1867-------
1868
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001869- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1870 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1871
1872- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1873 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1874 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1875 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1876 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1877 See PEP 307 for details.
1878
1879- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1880 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1881
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001882- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1883 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001884 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001885 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1886 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001887 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001888
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001889- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1890 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1891
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001892- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1893 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1894 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1895
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001896- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1897
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001898- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1899 exception.
1900
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001901- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1902 class.
1903
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001904- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1905 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1906 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1907
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001908- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1909 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1910
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001911- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001912 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1913 See SF bug #659228.
1914
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001915- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1916 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1917 See SF patch #651082.
1918
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001919- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001920
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001921- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1922 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1923
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001924- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001925 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001926
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001927- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1928 DOS paths from other platforms.
1929
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001930Tools/Demos
1931-----------
1932
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001933- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1934 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1935 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1936 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1937 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1938 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1939 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1940 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1941 example:
1942
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001943 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1944 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001945
1946 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1947
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001948
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001949Build
1950-----
1951
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001952- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1953 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1954 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001955 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1956
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001957 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1958
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001959- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1960 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1961 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1962 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1963 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1964 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1965 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1966 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1967 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1968
1969- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1970 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1971 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1972 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1973
1974- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1975 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1976
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001977C API
1978-----
1979
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001980- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1981 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001982
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001983- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1984 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1985 tp_as_number pointer.
1986
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001987- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1988 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1989 (SF #681367)
1990
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001991- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1992 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1993 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1994 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001995
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001996Tests
1997-----
1998
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001999- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002000 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2001 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2002 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2003 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2004 pydoc.)
2005
2006- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2007
2008- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002009
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002010Windows
2011-------
2012
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002013- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2014 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2015 time).
2016
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002017- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2018 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2019
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002020- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2021 release without strong cryptography.
2022
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002023- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002024 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002025
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002026- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2027 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2028
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002029Mac
2030---
2031
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002032- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2033 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002034
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002035- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2036 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2037 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002038
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002039- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2040 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002041
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002042- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2043 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2044 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2045 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002046
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002047- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002048 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2049 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2050 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002051
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002052
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002053What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002054=================================
2055
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002056*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002057
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002058Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002059--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002060
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002061- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2062
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002063- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2064 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002065 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002066 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002067 a different meaning than before.
2068
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002069- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002070 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002071 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002072
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002073- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002074 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002075 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002076
2077- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2078 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2079 and deallocation.
2080
2081- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2082 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2083
2084- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2085 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2086 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2087 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2088 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2089
2090- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2091 now detected by the garbage collector.
2092
2093- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2094 [SF bug 519621]
2095
2096- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2097 identifier.
2098
2099- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2100 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2101 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2102 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2103 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2104 [SF bug 563060]
2105
2106- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2107 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2108 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2109 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2110 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2111
2112- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2113 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2114 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2115
2116- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2117
2118- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2119 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2120 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2121 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2122 state of the slots would be lost.)
2123
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002124Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002125-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002126
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002127- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002128 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2129 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2130 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2131 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002132 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2133 Jython 2.1.
2134
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002135- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002136 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002137 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2138 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2139 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2140 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2141 these, see PEP 302.
2142
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002143- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2144 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2145 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2146
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002147- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2148 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2149 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2150
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002151- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2152 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2153 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2154
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002155- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2156 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2157 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2158 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2159 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2160 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2161 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2162 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2163 releases or implementations.
2164
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002165- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002166 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2167 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002168
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002169- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2170 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2171
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002172- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2173 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2174 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2175
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002176- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2177 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2178
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002179- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2180 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002181 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2182 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002183
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002184- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2185 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2186 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2187 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2188 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2189
2190 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2191 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2192 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2193 pattern.
2194
2195 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2196 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2197 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2198 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2199
2200 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2201 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2202 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2203 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2204 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2205 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2206
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002207- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2208 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2209 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2210 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2211 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2212 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2213 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2214 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002215
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002216- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2217 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2218 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2219 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2220 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002221 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2222 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2223 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2224 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2225 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2226 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2227 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002228
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002229- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2230 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2231
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002232- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2233 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2234 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2235 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2236 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2237 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2238 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2239 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2240 to Zack Weinberg!
2241
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002242- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2243 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2244 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2245 type. This has been fixed now.
2246
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002247- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2248 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2249 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2250
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002251- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2252 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2253 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2254 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2255 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2256 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2257 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2258 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002259 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002260
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002261- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2262 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2263 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002264
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002265- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2266 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2267 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2268 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2269 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2270 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2271 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2272 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002273 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002274 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2275 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2276
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002277- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2278 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2279 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2280 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2281 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2282 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2283 this.)
2284
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002285- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2286 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002287 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002288 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002289 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2290 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002291 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2292 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002293
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002294- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2295 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2296 currently running.
2297
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002298- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2299 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2300 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2301 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2302
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002303- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2304 as directory names.
2305
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002306- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2307 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2308
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002309- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2310 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2311
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002312- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002313 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2314 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002315
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002316- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2317 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2318 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2319 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2320 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2321
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002322- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2323 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2324 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2325 removed.
2326
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002327- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2328 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2329 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2330
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002331- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2332 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2333 to __debug__.
2334
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002335- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2336 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2337 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2338
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002339- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2340 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2341 deprecated now.
2342
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002343- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2344 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2345 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002346
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002347- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2348 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2349 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2350 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2351 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002352
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002353- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2354 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2355
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002356- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2357 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2358 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002359 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002360 is backward compatible.
2361
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002362- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2363 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2364 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2365 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2366 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2367
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002368- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2369 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2370 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2371 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2372 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2373 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002374
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002375- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2376 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2377
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002378- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2379 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2380
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002381- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2382 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2383 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2384 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2385 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2386
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002387- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2388 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2389 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2390
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002391- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002392 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2393
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002394- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2395 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2396 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002397
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002398- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2399 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2400
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002401- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2402 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2403 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2404
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002405- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2406
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002407Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002408-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002409
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002410- Added three operators to the operator module:
2411 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2412 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2413 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2414
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002415- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2416
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002417- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2418 archives.
2419
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002420- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2421 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2422 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2423
2424 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2425
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002426- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2427 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2428 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002429 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002430
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002431- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2432 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2433 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2434 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002435 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2436 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2437 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2438 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002439
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002440- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2441 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002442
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002443- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2444
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002445- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2446 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2447
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002448- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2449 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2450 supported.
2451
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002452- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2453
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002454- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2455 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002456
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002457- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2458 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2459
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002460- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2461
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002462- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2463 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2464
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002465- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2466 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2467 functions but callable type objects.
2468
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002469- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002470 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002471 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002472
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002473- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2474 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002475
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002476- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2477 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002478
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002479- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2480 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2481 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2482 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2483
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002484- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2485 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002486
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002487- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2488 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2489 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2490 and __imul__.
2491
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002492- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002493 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2494 is called.
2495
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002496- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2497 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2498 interpreter was compiled.
2499
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002500- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2501 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2502 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002503 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002504 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2505 1, not 2.
2506
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002507- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2508 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2509 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2510 limit.
2511
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002512- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2513 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2514 bug #623464.
2515
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002516- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2517 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2518 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2519 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2520
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002521Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002522-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002523
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002524- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2525
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002526- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2527 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2528 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2529 with Python 2.3a2.
2530
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002531- os.path exposes getctime.
2532
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002533- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002534 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002535 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002536 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002537 unit tests of floating point results.
2538
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002539- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2540 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2541 has been increased.
2542
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002543- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2544 executed.
2545
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002546- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2547 postinstallation script.
2548
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002549- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2550 test the current module.
2551
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002552- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002553 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2554 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2555 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2556 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2557
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002558- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002559 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002560 Ward's Optik package.
2561
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002562- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2563 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2564 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2565 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2566
2567- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2568 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002569 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002570
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002571- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2572 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2573 shelf are binary pickles.
2574
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002575- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2576 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2577
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002578- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2579 modules are iterators now.
2580
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002581- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2582 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2583 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2584 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2585 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2586 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002587
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002588- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2589 with their entity value.
2590
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002591- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2592
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002593- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2594 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002595
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002596- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2597 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002598 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002599
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002600- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2601 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2602 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2603 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2604 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2605 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2606 main():
2607
2608 import locale
2609 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2610
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002611- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2612 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2613
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002614- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2615 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2616 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2617 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2618 to the new standard.
2619
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002620- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2621 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2622 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2623 an extension to the database.
2624
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002625- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2626 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2627 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2628 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002629 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002630
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002631- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002632 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002633
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002634- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2635 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2636 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2637 bounded integers.
2638
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002639- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2640 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2641 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2642 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2643 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2644 in existence.
2645
2646 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2647 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2648 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2649 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2650 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2651 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2652
2653 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2654 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2655 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2656 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2657
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002658- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2659 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2660 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2661
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002662- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2663
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002664- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2665 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2666 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2667 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2668
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002669- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2670 argument.
2671
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002672- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2673 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2674 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2675 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2676 [SF patch 560794].
2677
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002678- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2679 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2680 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002681 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2682 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2683 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002684
2685- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2686 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002687
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002688- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2689 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2690 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2691 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002692
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002693- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2694 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2695 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2696 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2697 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2698
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002699- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002700
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002701- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2702
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002703- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2704 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2705 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2706 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2707 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2708 identical to None.
2709
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002710- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2711 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2712 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2713 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2714 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2715 results now.
2716
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002717- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2718 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2719
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002720- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2721 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2722 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2723 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2724 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2725 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2726 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2727 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2728
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002729- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2730
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002731- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2732 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2733
2734- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2735 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2736 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2737 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2738 and other systems.
2739
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002740- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2741 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2742 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2743 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 +00002744 work well with these.
2745
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002746- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2747
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002748- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002749 connections.
2750
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002751- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2752 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2753 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2754
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002755- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2756 sets
2757
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002758- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2759 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2760 name.
2761
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002762- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2763 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2764 passed in.
2765
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002766- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002767 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002768 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2769 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002770
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002771- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2772
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002773- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2774
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002775- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2776 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2777 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2778
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002779- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2780 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2781 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2782 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002783 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002784
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002785- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002786 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002787 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002788
2789- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2790 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2791 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2792
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002793- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002794 the value of its expression argument.
2795
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002796- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2797 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2798 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2799
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002800- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2801 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2802 skipstone browser was included.
2803
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002804- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2805 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2806
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002807Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002808-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002809
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002810- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2811 names in addition to accepting file names.
2812
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002813- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2814 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2815 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2816 still used and useful.)
2817
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002818- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2819 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2820 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2821 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002822
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002823- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2824 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2825 the generated binary.
2826
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002827Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002828-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002829
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002830- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2831
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002832- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2833 except in the hands of experts.
2834
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002835- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002836 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2837 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2838 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002839
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002840- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2841 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2842 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2843 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2844 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2845 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2846 builds.
2847
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002848- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2849 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2850 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2851 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2852 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2853 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2854 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2855 new type.
2856
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002857- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002858
2859 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2860 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2861 positive infinities.
2862
2863 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2864 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2865 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2866 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2867 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2868 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2869 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2870
2871 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2872
2873 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2874
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002875- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2876 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2877 size of the executable.
2878
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002879- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2880 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2881 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2882 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002883
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002884- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2885
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002886- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2887 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2888 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002889
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002890- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2891 well as Unix.
2892
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002893- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2894 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2895 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2896 modules in the README file for details.
2897
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002898C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002899-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002900
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002901- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2902 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002903 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002904 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002905 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002906
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002907- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2908 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2909 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2910 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2911 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2912 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002913 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002914 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2915 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2916 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2917 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2918 aligned.)
2919
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002920- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2921 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2922 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2923
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002924- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2925 level.
2926
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002927- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2928 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2929 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2930 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2931 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2932
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002933- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2934 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2935 code.
2936
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002937- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2938 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2939 adjusting for negative indices.
2940
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002941- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2942 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2943 object.
2944
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002945- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2946 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2947 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2948
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002949- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2950 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002951
2952- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2953
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002954- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2955 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2956 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2957 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2958
2959- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2960
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002961- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002962
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002963- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002964 without going through the buffer API.
2965
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002967
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002968- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2969 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2970 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2971 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2972
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002973- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2974 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2975
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002976- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002977 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2978
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002979New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002980-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002981
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002982- OpenVMS is now supported.
2983
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002984- AtheOS is now supported.
2985
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002986- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2987
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002988- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2989
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002990Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002991-----
2992
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002993- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2994 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2995 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002996
2997Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002999
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003000- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3001 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3002 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3003 bugs.
3004 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003005 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003006 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3007 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003008 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003009
3010- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003011 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003012
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003013- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3014 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3015
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003016- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3017 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003018 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003019 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3020
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003021- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3022 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3023 use files" uninstall option).
3024
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003025- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3026
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003027- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3028 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3029
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003030- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3031 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3032 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3033
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003034- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3035 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3036 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3037 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3038 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003039 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3040 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3041 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003042
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003043- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003044 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003045 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3046 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3047 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3048 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3049 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3050 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3051 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3052 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3053 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3054 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3055 work around.
3056
3057- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3058 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3059 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3060 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3061 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3062 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3063 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3064 specified with O_CREAT too).
3065
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003066Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003067----
3068
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003069- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003070
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003071- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3072 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3073 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3074
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003075- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3076 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3077 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3078
3079- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3080 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3081 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3082 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3083 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3084 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3085 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3086 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003087
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003088- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3089 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3090 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003091
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003092- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3093 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3094 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3095 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3096 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003097
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003098- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3099 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3100 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003101
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003102- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3103 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003104
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003105- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3106 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3107 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3108 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3109 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003110
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003111- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3112 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3113 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3114
3115- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3116 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3117 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003118
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003119- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3120 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3121 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3122 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003123 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003124
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003125- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3126 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003127
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003128- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3129 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003130
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003131- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003132 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003133 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3134 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003135
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003136
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003137What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003138===============================
3139
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3141
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003142Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003143--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003144
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003145- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3146 with a custom metaclass.
3147
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003148Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003149-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003150
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003151- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3152 are proxies.
3153
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003154Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003155-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003156
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003157- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3158 very short strings.
3159
3160- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3161 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3162 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3163 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3164 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3165
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003166Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003168
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003169- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3170 close or delete time).
3171
3172- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3173 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3174
3175- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3176
3177- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003178 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003179
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003180Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003182
3183Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003185
3186C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003187-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003188
3189New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003191
3192Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003194
3195Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003197
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003198- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3199
3200- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3201 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3202
3203- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3204 deleted at process exit time.
3205
3206- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3207 in backslash.
3208
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003209Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003211
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003212- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3213 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3214 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3215
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003216
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003217What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003218===========================
3219
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3221
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003222Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003224
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003225- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3226 been extensively updated. See
3227
3228 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3229
3230 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3231
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003232- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3233 deleted!
3234
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003235- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3236 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3237 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3238 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3239 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3240
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003241- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3242
3243 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3244 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3245
3246 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3247 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3248 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3249 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3250 supported anyway.
3251
3252 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3253 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3254
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003255- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3256 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3257 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3258 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3259 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003260
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003261- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3262 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3263 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3264
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003265Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003267
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003268- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3269 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3270 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3271 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3272 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3273 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003274 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3275 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3276 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3277 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003278
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003279- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3280 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3281 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3282
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003283Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003285
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003286- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3287
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003288Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003289-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003290
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003291- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3292 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3293 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3294 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3295 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3296 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3297
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003298- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3299
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003300- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3301
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003302- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3303
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003304- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3305 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3306 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3307
3308- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3309
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003310Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003312
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003313- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3314 off a search on Google.
3315
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003316Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003318
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003319- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3320 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3321 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3322 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3323 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3324 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3325 other platforms should do likewise.
3326
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003327- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3328 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3329 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3330
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003331C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003333
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003334- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3335 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3336 producing key-value pairs.
3337
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003338- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003339 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003340 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3341 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3342 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3343 previously went unchallenged.
3344
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003345New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003347
3348Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003349-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003350
3351Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003353
3354Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003355----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003356
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003357- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3358 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003359
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003360- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3361 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3362 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3363 home.
3364
3365
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003366What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003367===========================
3368
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003369*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3370
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003371Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003373
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003374- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3375 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003376
3377 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003378 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003379
3380 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3381 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003382 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003383 This needs to be documented.
3384
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003385- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3386 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3387
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003388- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3389 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3390 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3391
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003392- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3393 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3394
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003395- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3396 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3397 class forbids it).
3398
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003399- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3400 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3401 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3402
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003403- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3404
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003405Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003407
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003408- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3409 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003410 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003411
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003412- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3413 (like 1 + '').
3414
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003415Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003417
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003418- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3419 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3420 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3421 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003422 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003423 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3424
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003425- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3426 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3427 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3428 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3429
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003430- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3431 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003432 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3433 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3434 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003435
3436- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3437 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003438
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003439- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3440 bytes on its input.
3441
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003442Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003444
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003445- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003446 convenience function.
3447
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003448- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3449 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3450 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003451 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3452 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3453 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3454 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3455 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3456 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003457
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003458- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3459 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3460 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3461 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3462
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003463- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3464 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3465 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3466
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003467- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3468 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3469 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3470 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3471
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003472- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3473 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003474 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003475 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3476 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3477 new -l and -e options.
3478
3479- statcache is now deprecated.
3480
3481- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3482 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003484 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3485 time properly taken into account.
3486
3487- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3488 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3489 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3490 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3491
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003492Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003494
3495Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003497
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003498- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3499 is built with libdb3 if available.
3500
3501- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3502
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003503C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003505
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003506- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3507 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3508 PySequence_Size().
3509
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003510- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3511
3512- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3513 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3514 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3515
3516- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3517 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3518
3519- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3520 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3521
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003522New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003524
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003525- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3526 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3527
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003528- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3529 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3530
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003531- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3532
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003533Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003535
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003536- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3537 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3538
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003539Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003541
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003542Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003544
3545- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3546 removed completely in the next release.
3547
3548- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3549 OSX.
3550
3551- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3552 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3553
3554- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3555
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003556
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003557What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003558===========================
3559
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3561
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003562Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003564
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003565- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003566 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003567 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003568 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3569 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003570 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3571 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003572 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3573 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003574
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003575- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3576 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3577
3578- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3579 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3580
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003581Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003583
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003584- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3585 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3586 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3587 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3588 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3589 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3590 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3591 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3592
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003593- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3594 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3595 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3596 example).
3597
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003598- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003599 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003600 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003601 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003602
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003603- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3604 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3605 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003606 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003607
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003608- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3609 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3610 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3611 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3612 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3613 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3614
3615 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3616
3617 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3618
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003619Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003621
3622- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3623
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003624- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3625
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003626- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3627 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003628
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003629- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3630 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3631 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3632 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3633 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3634 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003635 attributes.
3636
3637- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3638 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3639 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003640
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003641- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3642 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3643 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003644
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003645- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3646 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3647 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003648 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3649 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3650
3651- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3652 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003653
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003654Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003655-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003656
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003657- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3658 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3659
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003660- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3661 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3662 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3663 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3664
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003665- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3666 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3667 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3668 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3669
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003670 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3671 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3672 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3673 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3674 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3675 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3676 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3677 without losing information).
3678
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003679- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003680 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3681 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3682 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3683 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3684 module).
3685
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003686 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003687 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3688 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3689 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3690 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003691
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003692- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003693 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3694 encoding.
3695
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003696- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3697 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3698
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003700 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3701
3702- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3703 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3704 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3705 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3706
3707- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3708
3709- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3710 ON, and OFF.
3711
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003712- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3713 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3714
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003715Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003717
3718- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3719 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3720 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003721
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003722- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3723 been added: -X and -E.
3724
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003725Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003727
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003728- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3729 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3730
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003731C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003733
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003734- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3735 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3736 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3737 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3738 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3739
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003740- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3741 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3742 as long) arguments.
3743
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003744- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3745 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3746 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3747 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3748 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3749 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3750
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003751- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3752 input.
3753
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003754New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003756
3757Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003758-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003759
3760Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003762
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003763- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3764 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3765 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3766
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003767- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3768 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3769 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003770 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003771
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3773 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3774 import signal
3775 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003776
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003778 while 1:
3779 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003781 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3782 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3783 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3784 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003785
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003786
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003787What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3788===========================
3789
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3791
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003792Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003794
3795- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3796 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3797 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3798
3799- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3800 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3801 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3802 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3803 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3804 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3805 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003806
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003807- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003808 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003809 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3810 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3811 associate a docstring with a property.
3812
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003813- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3814 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3815 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3816 other built-in object types.
3817
3818- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3819 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3820 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3821 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3822 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3823
3824- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3825 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3826
3827- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3828 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003829 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003830 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3831 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3832 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3833 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3834 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3835
3836- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3837 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3838 class.
3839
3840- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3841 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3842 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3843 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3844
3845- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3846 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3847 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3848 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3849
3850- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3851 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3852
3853- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3854 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3855 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3856 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3857 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003858 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003859 with the same value as s.
3860
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003861- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3862
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003863Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003865
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003866- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3867
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003868- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3869 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3870 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3871 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3872 objects.
3873
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003874- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3875 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003876 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3877 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3878
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003879- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3880 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3881 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3882
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003883Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003885
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003886- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3887 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3888 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3889 by the instances.
3890
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003891- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3892 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3893 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3894
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003895- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3896 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3897 before the entire comparison is complete.
3898
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003899- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3900 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3901 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3902
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003903- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3904 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3905 getwriter().
3906
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003907- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3908 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3909
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003910- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003911 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3912 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3913
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003914- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3915 iterable object.
3916
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003917- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3918 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003919
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003920- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3921 authentication.
3922
3923- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3924 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003925
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003926- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003927 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3928 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3929 a sample driver.)
3930
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003931Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003932-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003933
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003934- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3935 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3936 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3937 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3938 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3939 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3940 kernel has large file support.
3941
3942- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3943 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3944 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3945 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3946 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3947
3948- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3949 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3950 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3951
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003952C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003954
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003955- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3956 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3957
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003958New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003960
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003961- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3962 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3963
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003964Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003965-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003966
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003967- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3968 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3969 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3970 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3971 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3972
3973- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3974 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3975 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3976 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3977
3978- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3979 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3980
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003981Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003983
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003984- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003985 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3986 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003987
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003988
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003989What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3990===========================
3991
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3993
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003994Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003996
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003997- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3998 big to represent as a C double.
3999
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004000- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4001 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4002 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4003 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4004 restriction).
4005
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004006- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4007 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4008 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4009 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4010 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4011
4012 >>> dir([])
4013 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4014 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4015 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4016 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4017 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4018 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4019 'reverse', 'sort']
4020
4021 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4022
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004023- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004024 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4025 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4026 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4027 OverflowError exception.
4028
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004029- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004030 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004031 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4032 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4033 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4034 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4035 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004036 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4038 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4039
4040 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4041 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4042 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4043 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004044
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004045- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004046 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4047 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4048 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4049 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4050 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4051 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4052 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4053 once it is created.
4054
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004055- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4056 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4057 (key, value) pairs.
4058
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004059- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004060 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4061 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4062
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004063- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4064 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4065 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4066 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4067 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004068
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004069- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004070 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4071 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4072
4073 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4074
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004075- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004076 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4077
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004078Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004080
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004081- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004082 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4083 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004084
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004085- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4086 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4087 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4088 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4089 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4090 in this area anymore).
4091
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004092- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4093 threading.Timer.
4094
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004095- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4096 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4097
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004098- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004099 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4100
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004101- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004102 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4103 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4104 converted to Python longs.
4105
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004106- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004107 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4108
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004109- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4110 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4111 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4112
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004113Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004115
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004116- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4117 division operators as per PEP 238.
4118
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004119Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004121
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004122- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4123 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4124 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4125 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4126
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004127C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004129
4130- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004131
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004132- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4133 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004134 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004135
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4137 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004138 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004140
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004141- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004142 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4143 module:
4144
4145 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004146
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004147 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4148 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004149
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004150 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4151 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004152
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004153 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4154
4155 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4156
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004157- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004158 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4159 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4160 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004161
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004162New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004163-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004164
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004165- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4166 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4167 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4168 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4169 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004170
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004171Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004173
4174Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004176
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004177- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4178 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4179 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4180 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004181 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4182 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4183 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4184 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4185 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004186
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004187- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004188 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4189
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004190
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004191What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4192===========================
4193
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4195
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004196Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004198
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004199- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4200 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4201
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004202- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4203 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4204 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004205
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004206- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4207 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4208 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4209 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004210
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004211- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4212
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004213- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004214
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004215Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004217
4218- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004219 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004220 the module docstring for details.
4221
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004222Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004224
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004225- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004226 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4227 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4228 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004229
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004230- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4231 Nick Mathewson.
4232
4233Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004235
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004236- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4237 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4238 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4239 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4240 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4241 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4242 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4243 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4244
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004245- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4246 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4247 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4248 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4249
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004250- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4251 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4252 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4253 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4254 come a long way).
4255
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004256- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4257 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4258 write filters for these warnings).
4259
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004260- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4261 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4262 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4263 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4264 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4265
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004266- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4267 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4268 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4269 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4270 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4271 older distribution.
4272
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004273Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004275
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004276- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4277 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004278 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004279
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004280- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4281 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4282 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4283
4284- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4285
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004286- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4287
4288- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4289
4290- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4291
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004293
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004294- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4295
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004296New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004298
4299C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004301
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004302- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4303 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4304 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4305 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4306 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4307 against buffer overruns.
4308
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004309- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004310 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4311 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004312 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4313 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4314 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4315
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004316- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4317 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4318 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4319 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4320 deprecated.
4321
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004322Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004324
4325- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4326 relevant is found.
4327
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004328
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004329What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004330===========================
4331
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4333
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004334Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004336
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004337- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4338 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4339 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4340 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4341 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4342 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4343 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4344 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004345 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004346 repaired.
4347
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004348- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004349 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004350 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4351 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4352 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4353 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4354 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4355 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4356 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4357 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4358
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004359- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4360 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4361 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4362 leading BMO character).
4363
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004364- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4365 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4366 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4367
4368 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4369 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4370 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004371
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004372 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4373 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4374 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4375 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4376 for various simple to use conversions.
4377
4378 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4379 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4380
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4382 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4383 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4384 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4385 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4386 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4387 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4388 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4389 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4390 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4391 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4392 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4393 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4394 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4395 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004396
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004397- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4398 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4399 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004400 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004401 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004402
4403 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004404 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4405 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4406 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4407 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4408 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004409 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4410 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004411
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004412 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4413 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4414 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004415 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004416
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004417- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4418 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4419 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4420 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4421 floating arithmetic,
4422
4423 x = 9007199254740992.0
4424 print long(x)
4425
4426 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4427 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4428 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4429 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4430 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4431 functions are of good quality).
4432
4433 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4434 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4435 algorithms to break.
4436
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004437- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4438 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4439 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4440 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4441 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4442 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4443 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4444 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4445 order.
4446
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004447- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4448 operation along the most common code paths.
4449
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004450- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4451 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4452
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004453- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4454 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4455 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4456 {}.update(UserDict())
4457
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004458- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4459 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4460 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4461 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4462 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4463 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4464 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4465 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4466
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004467- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004468 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004470 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004471 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4472 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004473 join() method of strings
4474 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004475 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4476 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004478 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004479
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004480- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4481 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4482
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004483- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4484 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4485
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004486- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4487 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4488 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4489 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4490
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004491- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4492 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004493 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004494 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4495 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004496
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004497- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4498
4499
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004500Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004502
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004503- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004504 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004505 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4506 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4507
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004508- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4509 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4510
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004511- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4512 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4513 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4514 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4515
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004516- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4517 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4518 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4519
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004520- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4521
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004522- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4523
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004524- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4525 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4526 that are still imported into string.py).
4527
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004528- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4529
4530- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4531 Now it does.
4532
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004533- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4534
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004535- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4536 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4537 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4538 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4539 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004540 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4541 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004542
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004543- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4544 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4545 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4546 'help(object)'.
4547
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004548Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004550
4551- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004552 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004553 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4554 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4555
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004556- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004557 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4558 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004559
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004560C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004562
4563- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4564 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565
4566----
4567
4568**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**