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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
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000015- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
16
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000017- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
18 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
19 arguments.
20
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000021Extension modules
22-----------------
23
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000024- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
25
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000026- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
27 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
28 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
29
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000030- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
31
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000032- datetime changes:
33
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +000034 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
35 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
36 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
37 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
38 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
39 now.
40
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000041 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000042 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
43 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000044
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000045 In dt.asdatetime(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000046 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000047 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
48 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
49 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
50 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000051
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000052 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
53 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
54 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000055 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
56
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000057 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
58 by a later example coded by Guido.
59
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000060 datetimetz.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
61 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
62 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
63 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
64 ends. See new docs for details.
65
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +000066 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
67 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
68 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
69 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
70 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
71
Neal Norwitzdf8b47f2003-01-10 20:57:54 +000072- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
73 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
74
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000075Library
76-------
77
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +000078- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
79 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
80
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +000081- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
82 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
83 See SF bug #659228.
84
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +000085- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
86 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
87 See SF patch #651082.
88
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +000089- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000090
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +000091- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
92 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
93
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000094Tools/Demos
95-----------
96
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000097TBD
98
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000099Build
100-----
101
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000102- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
103 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
104 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
105 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
106 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
107 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
108 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
109 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
110 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
111
112- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
113 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
114 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
115 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
116
117- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
118 from the Tools/scripts directory.
119
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000120C API
121-----
122
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000123TBD
124
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000125New platforms
126-------------
127
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000128TBD
129
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000130Tests
131-----
132
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000133TBD
134
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000135Windows
136-------
137
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000138- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
139 absolute pathname.
140
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000141- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
142 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
143
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000144Mac
145---
146
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000147TBD
148
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000149
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000150What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000151=================================
152
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000153*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000154
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000155Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000156--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000157
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000158- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
159
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000160- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
161 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000162 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000163 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000164 a different meaning than before.
165
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000166- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000167 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000168 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000169
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000170- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000171 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000172 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000173
174- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
175 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
176 and deallocation.
177
178- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
179 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
180
181- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
182 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
183 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
184 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
185 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
186
187- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
188 now detected by the garbage collector.
189
190- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
191 [SF bug 519621]
192
193- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
194 identifier.
195
196- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
197 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
198 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
199 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
200 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
201 [SF bug 563060]
202
203- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
204 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
205 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
206 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
207 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
208
209- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
210 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
211 not called. [SF bug #537450]
212
213- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
214
215- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
216 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
217 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
218 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
219 state of the slots would be lost.)
220
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000221Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000222-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000223
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000224- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000225 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
226 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
227 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
228 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000229 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
230 Jython 2.1.
231
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000232- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000233 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000234 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
235 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
236 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
237 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
238 these, see PEP 302.
239
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000240- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
241 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
242 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
243
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000244- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
245 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
246 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
247
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000248- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
249 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
250 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
251
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000252- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
253 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
254 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
255 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
256 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
257 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
258 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
259 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
260 releases or implementations.
261
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000262- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000263 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
264 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000265
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000266- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
267 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
268
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000269- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
270 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
271 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
272
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000273- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
274 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
275
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000276- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
277 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000278 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
279 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000280
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000281- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
282 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
283 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
284 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
285 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
286
287 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
288 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
289 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
290 pattern.
291
292 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
293 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
294 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
295 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
296
297 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
298 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
299 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
300 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
301 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
302 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
303
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000304- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
305 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
306 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
307 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
308 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
309 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
310 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
311 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000312
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000313- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
314 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
315 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
316 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
317 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000318 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
319 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
320 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
321 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
322 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
323 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
324 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000325
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000326- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
327 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
328
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000329- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
330 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
331 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
332 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
333 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
334 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
335 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
336 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
337 to Zack Weinberg!
338
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000339- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
340 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
341 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
342 type. This has been fixed now.
343
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000344- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
345 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
346 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
347
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000348- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
349 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
350 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
351 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
352 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
353 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
354 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
355 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000356 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000357
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000358- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
359 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
360 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000361
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000362- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
363 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
364 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
365 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
366 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
367 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
368 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
369 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000370 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000371 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
372 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
373
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000374- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
375 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
376 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
377 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
378 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
379 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
380 this.)
381
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000382- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
383 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000384 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000385 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000386 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
387 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000388 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
389 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000390
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000391- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
392 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
393 currently running.
394
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000395- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
396 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
397 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
398 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
399
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000400- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
401 as directory names.
402
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000403- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
404 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
405
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000406- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
407 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
408
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000409- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000410 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
411 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000412
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000413- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
414 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
415 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
416 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
417 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
418
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000419- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
420 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
421 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
422 removed.
423
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000424- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
425 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
426 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
427
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000428- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
429 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
430 to __debug__.
431
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000432- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
433 string to the left with zeros. For example,
434 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
435
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000436- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
437 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
438 deprecated now.
439
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000440- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
441 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
442 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000443
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000444- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
445 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
446 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
447 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
448 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000449
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000450- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
451 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
452
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000453- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
454 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
455 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000456 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000457 is backward compatible.
458
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000459- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
460 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
461 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
462 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
463 could access a pointer to freed memory.
464
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000465- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
466 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
467 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
468 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
469 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
470 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000471
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000472- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
473 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
474
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000475- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
476 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
477
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000478- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
479 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
480 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
481 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
482 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
483
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000484- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
485 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
486 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
487
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000488- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000489 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
490
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000491- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
492 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
493 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000494
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000495- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
496 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
497
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000498- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
499 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
500 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000502Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000503-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000504
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000505- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
506
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000507- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
508 archives.
509
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000510- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
511 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
512 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
513
514 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
515
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000516- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
517 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
518 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000519 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000520
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000521- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
522 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
523 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
524 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
525 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000526
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000527- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
528 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000529
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000530- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
531
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000532- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
533 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
534
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000535- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
536 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
537 supported.
538
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000539- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
540
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000541- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
542 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000543
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000544- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
545 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
546
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000547- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
548
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000549- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
550 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
551
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000552- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
553 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
554 functions but callable type objects.
555
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000556- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000557 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000558 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000559
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000560- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
561 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000562
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000563- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
564 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000565
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000566- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
567 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
568 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
569 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
570
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000571- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
572 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000573
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000574- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
575 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
576 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
577 and __imul__.
578
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000579- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000580 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
581 is called.
582
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000583- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
584 been added where available.
585
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000586- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
587 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
588 interpreter was compiled.
589
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000590- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
591 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
592 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000593 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000594 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
595 1, not 2.
596
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000597- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
598 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
599 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
600 limit.
601
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000602- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
603 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
604 bug #623464.
605
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000606- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
607 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
608 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
609 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
610
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000611Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000612-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000613
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000614- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
615
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000616- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
617 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
618 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
619 with Python 2.3a2.
620
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000621- os.path exposes getctime.
622
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000623- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
624 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
625 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
626 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
627 unit tests of floating point results.
628
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000629- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
630 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
631 has been increased.
632
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000633- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
634 executed.
635
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000636- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
637 postinstallation script.
638
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000639- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
640 test the current module.
641
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000642- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
643 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
644 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
645 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
646 this behavior needs to be controlled.
647
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000648- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000649 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000650 Ward's Optik package.
651
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000652- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
653 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
654 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
655 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
656
657- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
658 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000659 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000660
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000661- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
662 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
663 shelf are binary pickles.
664
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000665- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
666 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
667
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000668- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
669 modules are iterators now.
670
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000671- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
672 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
673 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
674 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
675 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
676 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000677
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000678- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
679 with their entity value.
680
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000681- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
682
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000683- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
684 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000685
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000686- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
687 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000688 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000689
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000690- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
691 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
692 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
693 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
694 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
695 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
696 main():
697
698 import locale
699 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
700
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000701- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
702 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
703
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000704- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
705 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
706 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
707 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
708 to the new standard.
709
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000710- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
711 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
712 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
713 an extension to the database.
714
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000715- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
716 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
717 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
718 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000719 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000720
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000721- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
722
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000723- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000724 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000725
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000726- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
727 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
728 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
729 bounded integers.
730
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000731- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
732 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
733 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
734 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
735 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
736 in existence.
737
738 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
739 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
740 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
741 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
742 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
743 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
744
745 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
746 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
747 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
748 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
749
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000750- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
751 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
752 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
753
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000754- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
755
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000756- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
757 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
758 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
759 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
760
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000761- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
762 argument.
763
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000764- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
765 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
766 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
767 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
768 [SF patch 560794].
769
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000770- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
771 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
772 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000773 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
774 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
775 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000776
777- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
778 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000779
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000780- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
781 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
782 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
783 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000784
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000785- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
786 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
787 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
788 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
789 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
790
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000791- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000792
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000793- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
794
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000795- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
796 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
797 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
798 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
799 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
800 identical to None.
801
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000802- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
803 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
804 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
805 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
806 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
807 results now.
808
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000809- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
810 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
811
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000812- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
813 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
814 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
815 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
816 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
817 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
818 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
819 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
820
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000821- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
822
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000823- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
824 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
825
826- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
827 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
828 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
829 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
830 and other systems.
831
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000832- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
833 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
834 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
835 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 +0000836 work well with these.
837
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000838- compileall now supports quiet operation.
839
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000840- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000841 connections.
842
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000843- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
844 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
845 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
846
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000847- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
848 sets
849
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000850- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
851 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
852 name.
853
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000854- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
855 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
856 passed in.
857
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000858- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000859 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000860 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
861 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000862
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000863- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
864
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000865- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
866
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000867- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
868 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
869 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
870
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000871- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
872 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
873 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
874 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000875 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000876
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000877- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000878 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000879 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000880
881- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
882 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
883 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
884
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000885- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000886 the value of its expression argument.
887
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000888- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
889 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
890 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
891
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000892- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
893 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
894 skipstone browser was included.
895
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000896- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
897 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
898
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000899Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000900-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000901
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000902- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
903 names in addition to accepting file names.
904
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000905- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
906 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
907 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
908 still used and useful.)
909
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000910- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
911 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
912 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
913 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000914
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000915- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
916 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
917 the generated binary.
918
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000919Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000920-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000921
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000922- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
923
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000924- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
925 except in the hands of experts.
926
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000927- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000928 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
929 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
930 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000931
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000932- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
933 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
934 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
935 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
936 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
937 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
938 builds.
939
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000940- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
941 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
942 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
943 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
944 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
945 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
946 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
947 new type.
948
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000949- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000950
951 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
952 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
953 positive infinities.
954
955 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
956 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
957 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
958 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
959 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
960 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
961 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
962
963 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
964
965 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
966
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000967- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
968 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
969 size of the executable.
970
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000971- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
972 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
973 configure script. On other platforms, remove
974 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000975
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000976- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
977
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000978- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
979 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
980 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000981
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000982- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
983 well as Unix.
984
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000985- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
986 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
987 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
988 modules in the README file for details.
989
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000990C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000991-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000992
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000993- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
994 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000995 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000996 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000997 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000998
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000999- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1000 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1001 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1002 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1003 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1004 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1005 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1006 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1007 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1008 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1009 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1010 aligned.)
1011
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001012- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1013 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1014 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1015
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001016- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1017 level.
1018
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001019- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1020 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1021 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1022 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1023 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1024
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001025- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1026 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1027 code.
1028
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001029- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1030 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1031 adjusting for negative indices.
1032
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001033- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1034 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1035 object.
1036
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001037- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1038 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1039 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1040
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001041- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1042 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001043
1044- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1045
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001046- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1047 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1048 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1049 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1050
1051- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1052
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001053- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001054
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001055- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001056 without going through the buffer API.
1057
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001058- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001059
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001060- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1061 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1062 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1063 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1064
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001065- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1066 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1067
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001068- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001069 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1070
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001071New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001072-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001073
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001074- OpenVMS is now supported.
1075
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001076- AtheOS is now supported.
1077
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001078- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1079
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001080- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1081
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001082Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001083-----
1084
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001085- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1086 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1087 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001088
1089Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001090-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001091
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001092- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1093 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1094 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1095 bugs.
1096 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001097 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1098 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1099 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001100 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001101
1102- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001103 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001104
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001105- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1106 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1107
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001108- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1109 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1110 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1111 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1112
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001113- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1114 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1115 use files" uninstall option).
1116
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001117- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1118
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001119- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1120 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1121
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001122- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1123 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1124 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1125
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001126- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1127 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1128 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1129 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1130 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001131 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1132 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1133 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001134
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001135- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001136 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001137 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1138 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1139 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1140 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1141 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1142 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1143 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1144 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1145 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1146 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1147 work around.
1148
1149- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1150 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1151 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1152 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1153 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1154 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1155 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1156 specified with O_CREAT too).
1157
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001158Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001159----
1160
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001161- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001162
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001163- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1164 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1165 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1166
1167- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1168 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1169 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1170 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1171 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1172 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1173 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1174 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001175
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001176- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1177 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1178 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001179
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001180- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1181 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1182 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1183 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1184 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001185
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001186- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1187 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1188 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001189
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001190- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1191 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001192
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001193- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1194 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1195 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1196 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1197 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001198
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001199- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1200 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1201 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1202
1203- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1204 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1205 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001206
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001207- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1208 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1209 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1210 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1211 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001212
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001213- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1214 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001215
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001216- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1217 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001218
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001219- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1220 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1221 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1222 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001223
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001224What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001225===============================
1226
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001227*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1228
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001229Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001230--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001231
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001232- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1233 with a custom metaclass.
1234
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001235Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001236-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001237
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001238- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1239 are proxies.
1240
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001241Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001242-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001243
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001244- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1245 very short strings.
1246
1247- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1248 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1249 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1250 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1251 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1252
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001253Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001254-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001255
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001256- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1257 close or delete time).
1258
1259- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1260 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1261
1262- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1263
1264- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001265 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001266
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001267Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001268-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001269
1270Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001271-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001272
1273C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001274-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001275
1276New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001277-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001278
1279Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001280-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001281
1282Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001283-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001284
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001285- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1286
1287- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1288 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1289
1290- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1291 deleted at process exit time.
1292
1293- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1294 in backslash.
1295
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001296Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001297----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001298
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001299- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1300 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1301 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1302
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001303
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001304What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001305===========================
1306
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001307*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1308
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001309Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001310--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001311
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001312- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1313 been extensively updated. See
1314
1315 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1316
1317 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1318
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001319- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1320 deleted!
1321
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001322- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1323 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1324 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1325 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1326 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1327
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001328- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1329
1330 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1331 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1332
1333 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1334 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1335 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1336 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1337 supported anyway.
1338
1339 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1340 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1341
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001342- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1343 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1344 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1345 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1346 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001347
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001348- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1349 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1350 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1351
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001352Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001353-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001354
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001355- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1356 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1357 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1358 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1359 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1360 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001361 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1362 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1363 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1364 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001365
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001366- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1367 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1368 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1369
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001370Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001371-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001372
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001373- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1374
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001375Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001376-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001377
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001378- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1379 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1380 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1381 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1382 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1383 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1384
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001385- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1386
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001387- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1388
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001389- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1390
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001391- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1392 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1393 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1394
1395- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1396
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001397Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001398-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001399
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001400- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1401 off a search on Google.
1402
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001403Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001404-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001405
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001406- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1407 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1408 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1409 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1410 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1411 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1412 other platforms should do likewise.
1413
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001414- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1415 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1416 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1417
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001418C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001419-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001420
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001421- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1422 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1423 producing key-value pairs.
1424
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001425- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001426 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001427 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1428 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1429 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1430 previously went unchallenged.
1431
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001432New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001433-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001434
1435Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001436-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001437
1438Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001439-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001440
1441Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001442----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001443
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001444- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1445 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001446
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001447- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1448 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1449 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1450 home.
1451
1452
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001453What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001454===========================
1455
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001456*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1457
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001458Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001459--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001460
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001461- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1462 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001463
1464 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001465 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001466
1467 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1468 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001469 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001470 This needs to be documented.
1471
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001472- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1473 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1474
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001475- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1476 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1477 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1478
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001479- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1480 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1481
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001482- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1483 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1484 class forbids it).
1485
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001486- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1487 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1488 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1489
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001490- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1491
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001492Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001493-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001494
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001495- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1496 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001497 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001498
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001499- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1500 (like 1 + '').
1501
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001502Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001503-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001504
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001505- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1506 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1507 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1508 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001509 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001510 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1511
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001512- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1513 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1514 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1515 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1516
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001517- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1518 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001519 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1520 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1521 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001522
1523- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1524 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001525
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001526- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1527 bytes on its input.
1528
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001529Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001530-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001531
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001532- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001533 convenience function.
1534
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001535- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1536 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1537 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001538 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1539 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1540 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1541 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1542 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1543 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001544
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001545- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1546 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1547 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1548 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1549
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001550- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1551 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1552 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1553
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001554- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1555 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1556 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1557 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1558
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001559- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1560 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001561 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001562 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1563 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1564 new -l and -e options.
1565
1566- statcache is now deprecated.
1567
1568- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1569 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001570 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001571 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1572 time properly taken into account.
1573
1574- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1575 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1576 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1577 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1578
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001579Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001580-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001581
1582Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001583-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001584
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001585- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1586 is built with libdb3 if available.
1587
1588- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1589
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001590C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001591-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001592
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001593- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1594 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1595 PySequence_Size().
1596
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001597- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1598
1599- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1600 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1601 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1602
1603- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1604 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1605
1606- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1607 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1608
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001609New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001610-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001611
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001612- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1613 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1614
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001615- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1616 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1617
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001618- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1619
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001620Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001621-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001622
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001623- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1624 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1625
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001626Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001627-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001628
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001629Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001630----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001631
1632- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1633 removed completely in the next release.
1634
1635- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1636 OSX.
1637
1638- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1639 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1640
1641- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1642
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001643
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001644What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001645===========================
1646
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001647*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1648
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001649Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001650--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001651
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001652- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001653 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001654 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001655 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1656 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001657 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1658 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001659 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1660 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001661
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001662- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1663 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1664
1665- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1666 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1667
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001668Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001669-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001670
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001671- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1672 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1673 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1674 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1675 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1676 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1677 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1678 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1679
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001680- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1681 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1682 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1683 example).
1684
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001685- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001686 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001687 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001688 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001689
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001690- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1691 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1692 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001693 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001694
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001695- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1696 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1697 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1698 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1699 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1700 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1701
1702 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1703
1704 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1705
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001706Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001707-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001708
1709- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1710
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001711- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1712
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001713- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1714 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001715
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001716- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1717 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1718 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1719 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1720 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1721 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001722 attributes.
1723
1724- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1725 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1726 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001727
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001728- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1729 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1730 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001731
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001732- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1733 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1734 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001735 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1736 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1737
1738- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1739 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001740
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001741Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001742-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001743
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001744- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1745 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1746
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001747- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1748 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1749 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1750 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1751
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001752- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1753 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1754 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1755 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1756
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001757 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1758 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1759 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1760 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1761 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1762 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1763 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1764 without losing information).
1765
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001766- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001767 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1768 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1769 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1770 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1771 module).
1772
1773 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1774 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1775 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1776 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1777 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001778
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001779- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001780 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1781 encoding.
1782
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001783- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1784 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001786- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001787 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1788
1789- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1790 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1791 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1792 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1793
1794- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1795
1796- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1797 ON, and OFF.
1798
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001799- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1800 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1801
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001802Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001803-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001804
1805- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1806 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1807 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001808
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001809- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1810 been added: -X and -E.
1811
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001812Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001813-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001814
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001815- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1816 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1817
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001818C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001819-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001820
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001821- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1822 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1823 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1824 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1825 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1826
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001827- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1828 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1829 as long) arguments.
1830
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001831- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1832 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1833 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1834 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1835 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1836 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1837
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001838- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1839 input.
1840
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001841New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001842-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001843
1844Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001845-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001846
1847Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001848-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001849
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001850- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1851 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1852 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1853
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001854- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1855 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1856 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001857 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001858
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001859 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1860 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1861 import signal
1862 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001863
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001864 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001865 while 1:
1866 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001867 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001868 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1869 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1870 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1871 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001872
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001873
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001874What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1875===========================
1876
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001877*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1878
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001879Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001880--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001881
1882- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1883 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1884 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1885
1886- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1887 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1888 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1889 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1890 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1891 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1892 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001893
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001894- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001895 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001896 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1897 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1898 associate a docstring with a property.
1899
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001900- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1901 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1902 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1903 other built-in object types.
1904
1905- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1906 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1907 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1908 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1909 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1910
1911- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1912 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1913
1914- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1915 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001916 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001917 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1918 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1919 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1920 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1921 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1922
1923- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1924 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1925 class.
1926
1927- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1928 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1929 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1930 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1931
1932- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1933 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1934 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1935 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1936
1937- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1938 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1939
1940- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1941 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1942 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1943 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1944 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001945 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001946 with the same value as s.
1947
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001948- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1949
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001950Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001951----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001952
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001953- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1954
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001955- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1956 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1957 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1958 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1959 objects.
1960
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001961- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1962 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001963 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1964 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1965
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001966- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1967 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1968 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1969
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001970Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001971-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001972
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001973- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1974 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1975 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1976 by the instances.
1977
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001978- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1979 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1980 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1981
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001982- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1983 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1984 before the entire comparison is complete.
1985
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001986- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1987 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1988 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1989
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001990- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1991 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1992 getwriter().
1993
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001994- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1995 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1996
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001997- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001998 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1999 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2000
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002001- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2002 iterable object.
2003
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002004- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2005 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002006
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002007- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2008 authentication.
2009
2010- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2011 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002012
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002013- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002014 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2015 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2016 a sample driver.)
2017
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002018Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002019-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002020
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002021- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2022 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2023 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2024 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2025 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2026 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2027 kernel has large file support.
2028
2029- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2030 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2031 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2032 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2033 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2034
2035- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2036 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2037 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2038
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002039C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002040-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002041
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002042- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2043 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2044
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002045New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002046-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002047
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002048- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2049 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2050
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002052-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002053
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002054- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2055 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2056 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2057 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2058 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2059
2060- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2061 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2062 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2063 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2064
2065- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2066 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2067
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002068Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002069-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002070
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002071- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002072 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2073 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002074
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002075
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002076What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2077===========================
2078
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002079*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2080
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002081Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002082----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002083
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002084- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2085 big to represent as a C double.
2086
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002087- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2088 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2089 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2090 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2091 restriction).
2092
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002093- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2094 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2095 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2096 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2097 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2098
2099 >>> dir([])
2100 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2101 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2102 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2103 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2104 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2105 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2106 'reverse', 'sort']
2107
2108 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2109
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002110- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002111 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2112 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2113 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2114 OverflowError exception.
2115
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002116- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002117 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002118 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2119 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2120 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2121 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2122 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002123 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002124 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2125 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2126
2127 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2128 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2129 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2130 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002131
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002132- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002133 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2134 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2135 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2136 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2137 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2138 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2139 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2140 once it is created.
2141
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002142- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2143 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2144 (key, value) pairs.
2145
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002146- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002147 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2148 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2149
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002150- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2151 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2152 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2153 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2154 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002155
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002156- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002157 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2158 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2159
2160 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2161
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002162- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002163 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2164
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002165Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002166-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002167
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002168- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002169 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2170 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002171
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002172- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2173 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2174 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2175 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2176 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2177 in this area anymore).
2178
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002179- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2180 threading.Timer.
2181
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002182- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2183 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2184
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002185- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002186 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2187
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002188- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002189 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2190 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2191 converted to Python longs.
2192
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002193- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002194 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2195
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002196- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2197 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2198 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2199
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002200Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002201-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002202
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002203- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2204 division operators as per PEP 238.
2205
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002206Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002207-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002208
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002209- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2210 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2211 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2212 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2213
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002214C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002215-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002216
2217- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002218
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002219- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2220 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002221 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002222
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002223 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2224 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002225 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002226 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002227
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002228- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002229 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2230 module:
2231
2232 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002233
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002234 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2235 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002236
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002237 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2238 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002239
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002240 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2241
2242 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2243
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002244- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002245 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2246 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2247 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002248
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002249New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002250-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002251
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002252- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2253 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2254 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2255 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2256 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002257
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002258Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002259-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002260
2261Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002262-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002263
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002264- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2265 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2266 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2267 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002268 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2269 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2270 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2271 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2272 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002274- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002275 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2276
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002277
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002278What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2279===========================
2280
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002281*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2282
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002283Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002284-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002285
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002286- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2287 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2288
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002289- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2290 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2291 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002292
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002293- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2294 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2295 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2296 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002297
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002298- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2299
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002300- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002301
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002302Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002303-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002304
2305- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002306 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002307 the module docstring for details.
2308
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002309Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002310-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002311
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002312- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002313 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2314 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2315 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002316
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002317- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2318 Nick Mathewson.
2319
2320Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002321----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002322
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002323- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2324 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2325 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2326 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2327 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2328 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2329 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2330 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2331
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002332- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2333 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2334 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2335 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2336
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002337- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2338 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2339 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2340 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2341 come a long way).
2342
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002343- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2344 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2345 write filters for these warnings).
2346
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002347- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2348 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2349 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2350 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2351 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2352
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002353- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2354 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2355 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2356 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2357 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2358 older distribution.
2359
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002360Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002361-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002362
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002363- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2364 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002365 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002366
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002367- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2368 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2369 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2370
2371- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2372
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002373- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2374
2375- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2376
2377- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002379- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002380
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002381- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2382
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002383New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002384-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002385
2386C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002388
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002389- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2390 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2391 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2392 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2393 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2394 against buffer overruns.
2395
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002396- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002397 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2398 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002399 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2400 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2401 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2402
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002403- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2404 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2405 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2406 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2407 deprecated.
2408
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002409Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002410-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002411
2412- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2413 relevant is found.
2414
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002415
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002416What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002417===========================
2418
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002419*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2420
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002421Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002422----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002423
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002424- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2425 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2426 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2427 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2428 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2429 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2430 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2431 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002432 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002433 repaired.
2434
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002435- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002436 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002437 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2438 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2439 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2440 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2441 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2442 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2443 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2444 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2445
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002446- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2447 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2448 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2449 leading BMO character).
2450
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002451- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2452 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2453 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2454
2455 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2456 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2457 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002458
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002459 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2460 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2461 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2462 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2463 for various simple to use conversions.
2464
2465 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2466 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2467
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002468 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2469 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2470 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2471 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2472 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2473 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2474 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2475 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2476 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2477 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2478 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2479 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2480 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2481 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2482 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002483
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002484- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2485 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2486 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002487 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002488 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002489
2490 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002491 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2492 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2493 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2494 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2495 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002496 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2497 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002498
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002499 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2500 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2501 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002502 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002503
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002504- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2505 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2506 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2507 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2508 floating arithmetic,
2509
2510 x = 9007199254740992.0
2511 print long(x)
2512
2513 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2514 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2515 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2516 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2517 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2518 functions are of good quality).
2519
2520 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2521 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2522 algorithms to break.
2523
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002524- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2525 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2526 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2527 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2528 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2529 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2530 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2531 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2532 order.
2533
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002534- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2535 operation along the most common code paths.
2536
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002537- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2538 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2539
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002540- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2541 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2542 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2543 {}.update(UserDict())
2544
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002545- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2546 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2547 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2548 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2549 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2550 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2551 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2552 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2553
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002554- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002555 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002556
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002557 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002558 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2559 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002560 join() method of strings
2561 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002562 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2563 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002564 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002565 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002566
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002567- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2568 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2569
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002570- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2571 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2572
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002573- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2574 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2575 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2576 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2577
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002578- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2579 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002580 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002581 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2582 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002583
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002584- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2585
2586
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002587Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002588-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002589
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002590- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002591 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002592 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2593 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2594
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002595- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2596 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2597
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002598- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2599 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2600 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2601 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2602
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002603- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2604 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2605 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2606
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002607- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2608
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002609- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2610
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002611- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2612 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2613 that are still imported into string.py).
2614
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002615- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2616
2617- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2618 Now it does.
2619
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002620- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2621
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002622- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2623 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2624 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2625 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2626 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002627 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2628 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002629
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002630- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2631 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2632 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2633 'help(object)'.
2634
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002635Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002636-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002637
2638- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002639 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002640 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2641 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2642
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002643- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002644 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2645 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002646
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002647C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002649
2650- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2651 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002652
2653----
2654
2655**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**