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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000015- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
16 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
17 @staticmethod
18 def foo(bar):
19 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect this XXX before 2.4a2)
20
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000021- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
22 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
23 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
24 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
25 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
26 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
27 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
28 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
29 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
30 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
31 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
32
33 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
34 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
35 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
36 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
37 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
38 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
39 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
40
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000041- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
42 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
43
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000044- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000045 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000046
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000047- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000048 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000049 which was missing for no apparent reason.
50
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000051- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000052 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
53 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
54
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000055- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
56 types that support garbage collection.
57
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000058- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
59
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000060- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
61 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
62 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
63 Jython.
64
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000065- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
66
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +000067- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
68 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
69
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +000070- unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and the East Asian
71 Width support is moved to unicodedata extension module.
72
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000073Extension modules
74-----------------
75
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000076- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
77
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000078Library
79-------
80
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +000081- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
82
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +000083- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
84 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
85 same as when the argument is omitted).
86 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
87
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +000088- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
89
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +000090- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
91 schemes are offered.
92
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000093- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
94
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000095- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
96 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
97 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
98
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000099- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
100
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000101- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
102 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
103
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000104- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
105 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
106 when dummy_threading is being used.
107
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000108- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
109 from a tarfile.
110
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000111- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000112 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000113
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000114- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
115 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
116 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
117 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
118
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000119- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
120 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
121
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000122- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
123 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
124 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
125 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
126 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
127 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
128 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
129 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
130 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
131 by some other method in progress).
132
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000133- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
134 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
135 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000136
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000137- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
138
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000139- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
140 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
141 AM Kuchling.
142
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000143- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
144 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
145 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
146
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000147- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
148 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
149 instead of unsigned.
150
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000151- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000152 no longer part of the public API.
153
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000154- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
155 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
156 string methods of the same name).
157
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000158- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
159 SF patch 982681.
160
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000161- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000162 SF patch 945642.
163
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000164- doctest unittest integration improvements:
165
166 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
167
168 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
169 DocTestSuites.
170
171- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
172 that provide thread-local data.
173
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000174- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
175 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
176
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000177- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
178
179- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
180 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
181 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
182
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000183- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
184
185 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
186 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
187 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000188
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000189 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
190 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
191 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
192 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
193
194 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
195 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
196
197 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
198 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
199 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
200 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
201
202 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
203 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
204 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
205 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
206 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
207
208 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
209 wrapping help output.
210
211 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
212 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
213 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000214
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000215Tools/Demos
216-----------
217
218Build
219-----
220
221C API
222-----
223
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000224- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
225 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
226 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
227 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
228 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
229 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
230 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
231 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
232 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
233 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
234 its visible semantics have not changed.
235
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000236- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
237 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
238
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000239Documentation
240-------------
241
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000242- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000243
244 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
245 assigning thier values
246
247 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
248
249 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
250
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000251- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000252
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000253New platforms
254-------------
255
256Tests
257-----
258
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000259- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000260 platforms that use the Makefile.
261
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000262- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
263 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
264 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
265
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000266Windows
267-------
268
269Mac
270---
271
272
273
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000274What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
275=================================
276
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000277*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000278
279Core and builtins
280-----------------
281
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000282- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
283 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
284 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
285 objects now (one object instead of three).
286
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000287- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
288 Windows DLLs.
289
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000290- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
291 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000292
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000293- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
294 a new .pyc magic.
295
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000296- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
297 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
298 be there.
299
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000300- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
301 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
302 the LC_NUMERIC category.
303
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000304- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
305 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
306 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
307
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000308- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
309
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000310- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
311 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
312 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000313
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000314- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
315 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
316
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000317- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
318
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000319- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000320 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000321
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000322- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
323
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000324- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
325
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000326- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
327 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
328
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000329- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
330 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
331 Fixes bug #858016 .
332
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000333- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
334 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
335 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
336
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000337- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
338 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
339 improves their performance (about 35%).
340
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000341- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
342 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
343 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
344
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000345- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
346 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
347 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
348 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
349
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000350- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
351 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
352 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
353 length is not known).
354
355- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
356 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000357 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
358 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000359 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
360
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000361- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
362 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
363
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000364- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
365 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
366 keyword arguments.
367
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000368- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
369 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
370 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
371
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000372- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
373 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
374 cases.
375
376- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
377 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
378 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
379 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
380 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
381 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
382 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
383 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
384 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
385 a release build.
386
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000387- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
388 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
389
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000390- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000391 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000392
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000393- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
394 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
395 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
396 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
397 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
398 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
399 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
400 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
401 destroyed.
402
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000403- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
404 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
405 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
406 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
407 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
408 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
409 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
410 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
411
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000412- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
413 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
414 character other than a space.
415
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000416- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
417 by the function object or by the method object, the function
418 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
419 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
420 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
421 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
422 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
423 attributes with the same name.
424
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000425- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
426 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
427 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
428 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
429 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
430 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
431 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
432 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
433 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
434 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
435 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
436 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
437 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
438 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000439
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000440- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
441 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
442 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
443 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
444 This has been repaired.
445
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000446- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
447
448- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
449
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000450- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
451 over a sequence.
452
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000453- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000454 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000455
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000456- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
457
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000458- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
459 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
460 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
461 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
462 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
463 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
464 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
465 records with equal keys is unchanged).
466
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000467- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
468 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
469 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
470
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000471- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
472 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
473 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
474 freelist.
475
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000476- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
477 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
478
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000479- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
480 number.
481
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000482- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
483 a TypeError exception.
484
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000485- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
486 820195.
487
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000488- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
489 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
490 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
491
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000492- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000493 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
494 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000495
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000496- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
497 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
498 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
499
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000500- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
501 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000502 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000503
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000504- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000505 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
506 the first call.
507
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000508
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000509Extension modules
510-----------------
511
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000512- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
513 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
514
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000515- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
516 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
517 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
518 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
519 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
520 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
521 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000522
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000523- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
524
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000525- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
526
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000527- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
528 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
529
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000530- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
531 fewer false positives.
532
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000533- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
534 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
535
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000536- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000537 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
538
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000539- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000540 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000541 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
542 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
543 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000544
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000545- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
546 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
547 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
548 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
549
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000550- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
551 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
552 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
553 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
554 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
555 #897625.
556
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000557- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
558 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
559
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000560- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
561 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
562 and pops on either side of the deque.
563
564- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
565 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
566
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000567- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
568 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
569 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
570 other functions that expect a function argument.
571
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000572- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
573
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000574- os.getsid was added.
575
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000576- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
577 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
578 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
579
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000580- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
581
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000582- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
583
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000584- readline.clear_history was added.
585
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000586- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
587
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000588- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
589
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000590- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
591
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000592- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
593
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000594- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
595
596- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
597
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000598- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
599
600- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
601
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000602- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
603 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
604 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
605
606- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
607 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
608 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
609 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
610 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
611 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
612 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
613
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000614- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
615 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
616 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
617 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000618
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000619- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000620 iterators from a single iterable.
621
622- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
623 of raising a TypeError exception.
624
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000625- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
626 as parameter.
627
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000628Library
629-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000630
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000631- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
632 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
633 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000634
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000635- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
636 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
637 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000638
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000639- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000640
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000641- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
642 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000643
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000644- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
645 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
646
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000647- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
648
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000649- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000650 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000651
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000652- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
653 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
654
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000655- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
656
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000657- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
658 on cygwin and mingw32.
659
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000660- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
661
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000662- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
663 module.
664
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000665- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
666 installation scheme for all platforms.
667
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000668- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000669 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000670
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000671- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
672 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
673 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
674
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000675- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
676 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
677 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
678
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000679- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
680
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000681- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
682
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000683- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
684 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
685
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000686- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
687 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
688 type pattern with the same value exists.
689
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000690- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
691 when run from the command prompt).
692
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000693- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
694 not taken into consideration when caching value.
695
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000696- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
697 default sort).
698
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000699- Added global runctx function to profile module
700
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000701- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
702
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000703- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
704
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000705- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
706
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000707- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000708 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
709 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
710 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
711 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
712 accordingly.
713
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000714- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
715 decoding standards.
716
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000717- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
718 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
719 called for all requests.
720
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000721- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
722 they are passed to the compiler.
723
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000724- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
725 indent, width and depth.
726
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000727- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
728 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
729
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000730- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
731 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
732
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000733- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
734
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000735- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
736
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000737- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
738
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000739- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
740 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
741
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000742- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000743 for better performance.
744
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000745- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000746
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000747- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
748 a string).
749
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000750- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
751
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000752- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
753
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000754- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
755
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000756- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
757
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000758- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
759 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
760 list of fieldnames.
761
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000762- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
763 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
764
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000765- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
766
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000767- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
768 empty lists.
769
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000770- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
771 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
772 and shelves.
773
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000774- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
775 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
776
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000777- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000778 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
779 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000780
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000781- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
782 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000783 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000784
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000785- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000786 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
787 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
788
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000789- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
790 and removed in Py2.4.
791
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000792- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
793
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000794- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
795
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000796Tools/Demos
797-----------
798
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000799- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
800 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
801
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000802- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
803
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000804- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
805 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
806 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
807 destination in situations where both files are given.
808
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000809- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
810 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
811 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
812 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
813
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000814- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
815
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000816- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
817 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
818 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
819 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
820 now.
821
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000822- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
823 in effect
824
825- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
826 C-c C-h
827
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000828- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
829 -d option was given.
830
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000831Build
832-----
833
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000834- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
835 build under OS X.
836
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000837- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
838 --enable-profiling.
839
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000840- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
841 is configured --with-tsc.
842
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000843- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
844 on AMD64.
845
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000846- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
847 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
848
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000849- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
850 removed.
851
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000852- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
853 supported (see PEP 11).
854
855- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
856
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000857- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
858
859- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
860 (see PEP 11).
861
862- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
863 sizeof(char) must be 1.
864
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000865C API
866-----
867
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000868- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
869 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
870 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
871
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000872- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
873 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
874 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
875 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
876
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000877- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
878 generator objects.
879
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000880- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
881 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000882 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
883 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000884
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000885- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
886 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
887
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000888- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
889 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
890 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
891 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
892 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
893
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000894- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
895 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
896 about 10% faster.
897
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000898- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
899 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
900
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000901- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
902 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
903 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
904 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
905
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000906Windows
907-------
908
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000909- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
910 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
911 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
912 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
913
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000914- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
915 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
916 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
917
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000918
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000919What's New in Python 2.3 final?
920===============================
921
922*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
923
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000924IDLE
925----
926
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000927- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
928 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
929 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
930 context-menu actions.
931
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000932- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
933 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
934 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
935 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
936 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
937 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
938 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
939 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
940 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
941
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000942
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000943What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
944=============================================
945
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000946*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000947
948Core and builtins
949-----------------
950
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000951- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000952 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000953 comment at the end are still unsupported.
954
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000955Extension modules
956-----------------
957
958- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
959 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
960 than once. This has been fixed.
961
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000962- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
963 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
964 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
965 call.
966
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000967- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
968
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000969Library
970-------
971
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000972- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
973 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
974
975- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
976 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
977 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
978 restored.
979
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000980IDLE
981----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000982
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000983- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000984
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000985Build
986-----
987
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000988- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
989 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
990
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000991C API
992-----
993
994Windows
995-------
996
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000997- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
998 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
999
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001000- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1001
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001002Mac
1003---
1004
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001005- Various fixes to pimp.
1006
1007- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1008
1009- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1010 more problems than it solves.
1011
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001012
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001013What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1014=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001015
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001016*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1017
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001018Core and builtins
1019-----------------
1020
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001021- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1022 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1023
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001024- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1025 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001026 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001027
1028- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1029 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1030 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001031 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001032
1033- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1034 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001035
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001036- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1037 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1038 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1039
1040- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001041 770247.
1042
1043- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001044
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001045Extension modules
1046-----------------
1047
1048- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1049 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1050
1051- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1052
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001053- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1054
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001055- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1056 contained within the _strptime module.
1057
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001058- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1059 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1060
1061- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001062 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1063
1064- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1065 the find_class attribute, if present.
1066
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001067- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001068
1069 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1070 (SF bug 763298).
1071
1072 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001073 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1074 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1075 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001076
1077 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1078
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001079Library
1080-------
1081
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001082- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1083
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001084- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1085 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1086 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1087 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1088 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1089 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1090 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1091 or Tester().
1092
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001093- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1094 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1095 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1096 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1097 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1098 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1099 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1100 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1101 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001102
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001103 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001104
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001105- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1106 weren't before was an oversight.
1107
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001108- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1109 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1110
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001111- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1112 when there are no lines.
1113
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001114- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1115 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1116
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001117- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1118 to child processes.
1119
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001120- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1121
1122- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1123
1124- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1125 xmlrpclib.
1126
1127- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1128 responses.
1129
1130- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1131 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1132
1133- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1134 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1135 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1136
1137- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1138 used as patterns.
1139
1140- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1141 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1142 than Tk 8.3.
1143
1144- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1145
1146- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001147
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001148Tools/Demos
1149-----------
1150
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001151- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1152
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001153- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1154
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001155- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001156
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001157Build
1158-----
1159
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001160- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1161
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001162- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1163
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001164- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1165 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001166
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001167- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1168 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1169 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001170
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001171C API
1172-----
1173
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001174- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1175 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1176
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001177Windows
1178-------
1179
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001180- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1181 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1182 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1183 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1184 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1185 Python exception ::
1186
1187 thread.error: can't start new thread
1188
1189 is raised now.
1190
1191- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1192 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1193 instead of from DLL teardown.
1194
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001195Mac
1196---
1197
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001198- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001199 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001200 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1201 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1202 the executable in the bundle.
1203
1204- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001205
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001206- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1207
1208- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1209 on Panther.
1210
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001211What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1212================================
1213
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001214*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001215
1216Core and builtins
1217-----------------
1218
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001219- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1220 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1221 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1222 with the -i option.
1223
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001224- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1225 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1226
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001227- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1228 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1229
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001230- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1231 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1232 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1233 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1234 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1235 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1236 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1237 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1238 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1239 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1240 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1241 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1242 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001243
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001244- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1245 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1246 embedded in a lambda expression.
1247
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001248- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1249 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1250 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1251 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1252 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1253
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001254- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1255 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1256 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1257
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001258- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1259 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1260
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001261- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1262 It's writable again.
1263
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001264- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1265 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1266 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001267 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001268
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001269- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1270 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1271 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1272
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001273Extension modules
1274-----------------
1275
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001276- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1277 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1278
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001279- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1280 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1281 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1282 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1283
1284- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1285 collection.
1286
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001287- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1288 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1289 unique within a single program run.
1290
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001291- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1292 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1293
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001294- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1295 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1296
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001297- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1298 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001299
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001300- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1301
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001302- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1303 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1304
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001305- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1306 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1307 for many BSD-derived systems.
1308
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001309
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001310Library
1311-------
1312
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001313- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1314 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1315 primary ones:
1316
1317 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1318 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1319 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1320
1321 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1322 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1323 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1324 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1325 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1326 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1327
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001328- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1329 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1330 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1331 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1332 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1333 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1334 argument.
1335
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001336- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1337 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1338 in the archive.
1339
1340- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1341 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1342
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001343- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1344 569574).
1345
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001346- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1347 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1348 no more.
1349
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001350- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1351 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1352 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1353 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1354 code coverage.
1355
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001356- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1357 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1358 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001359 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1360 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001361
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001362- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1363 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1364 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001365 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001366
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001367- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1368
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001369- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1370 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1371 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1372 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1373
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001374- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1375 handling.
1376
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001377- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1378 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1379
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001380- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1381 in socket.py.
1382
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001383- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1384
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001385- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1386 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1387 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1388 opener with proxy support.
1389
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001390- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1391
1392- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1393
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001394Tools/Demos
1395-----------
1396
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001397- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1398
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001399- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1400
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001401- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1402 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001403
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001404- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1405 files.
1406
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001407Build
1408-----
1409
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001410- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001411 different root directory.
1412
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001413C API
1414-----
1415
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001416- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1417 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1418 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1419 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1420 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1421 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1422 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1423 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1424 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1425 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1426
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001427- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1428 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1429 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1430 from Python.
1431
1432
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001433New platforms
1434-------------
1435
1436None this time.
1437
1438Tests
1439-----
1440
1441- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1442 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1443
1444Windows
1445-------
1446
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001447- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1448
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001449- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1450 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1451 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1452 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1453 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1454 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1455 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1456 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1457 that's what it's for.
1458
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001459Mac
1460---
1461
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001462- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1463 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1464 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1465 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001466- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1467 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1468- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001469
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001470SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1471------------------------------------
1472
1473430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1474598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1475622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1476661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1477683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1478697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1479713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1480724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1481727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1482729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1483730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1484731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1485732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1486733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1487735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1488740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1489744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1490745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1491747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1492749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1493751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1494753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1495755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1496757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1497760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1498
1499
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001500What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1501================================
1502
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001503*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001504
1505Core and builtins
1506-----------------
1507
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001508- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1509 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1510
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001511- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1512 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1513 and cannot be strings).
1514
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001515- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1516 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1517 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1518 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1519
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001520- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1521 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1522 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1523 Python itself.
1524
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001525- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1526 the referenced object, if it has one.
1527
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001528- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1529 the thread started at
1530 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1531
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001532- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1533 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1534 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1535 placed on a list index.
1536
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001537- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1538 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1539 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1540 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1541
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001542- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1543 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1544 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1545 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1546 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1547 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1548 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1549
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001550- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1551 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1552 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1553 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1554 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1555
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001556- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1557 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001558
1559- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1560 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1561 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1562 #693195.)
1563
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001564- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1565 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001566
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001567- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001568 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001569 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1570 interpreter executions, would fail.
1571
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001572- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001573 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001574 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001575
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001576Extension modules
1577-----------------
1578
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001579- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1580 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1581 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1582 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1583
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001584- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1585 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1586
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001587- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1588 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1589 and Greg Chapman.)
1590
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001591- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1592 recursively.
1593
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001594- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001595 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1596 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1597 leaks.
1598
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001599- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1600
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001601- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1602 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1603 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1604 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1605 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1606 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1607 #705836.
1608
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001609- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001610 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1611
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001612- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1613 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1614 See SF bug #692416.
1615
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001616- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1617 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1618
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001619- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1620 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1621 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001622
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001623- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001624 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1625 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1626
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001627- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1628 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1629 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1630 timeouts to work properly.
1631
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001632Library
1633-------
1634
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001635- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1636 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1637 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1638 future release.
1639
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001640- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1641 for querying platform dependent features.
1642
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001643- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001644
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001645- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1646 pickle protocol versions.
1647
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001648- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1649 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1650 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1651
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001652- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1653
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001654- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1655 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1656 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1657 modules.
1658
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001659- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1660 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1661 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1662
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001663- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1664 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1665
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001666- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1667 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1668 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1669
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001670- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001671 MS Office extensions.
1672
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001673- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1674 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1675
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001676- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1677 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1678
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001679- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1680 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1681 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1682 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1683 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1684 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1685
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001686- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1687 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1688 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001689
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001690- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1691 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1692 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1693
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001694- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1695
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001696- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1697 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1698 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1699
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001700Tools/Demos
1701-----------
1702
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001703- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1704 See the module docstring for details.
1705
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001706Build
1707-----
1708
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001709- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1710 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001711
1712C API
1713-----
1714
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001715- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1716
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001717- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1718 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1719 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1720
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001721- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1722 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001723
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001724 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1725 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1726 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001727
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001728- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001729 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1730
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001731- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1732 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1733 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001734
1735New platforms
1736-------------
1737
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001738None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001739
1740Tests
1741-----
1742
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001743- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1744 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001745
1746Windows
1747-------
1748
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001749- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1750 function.
1751
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001752- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1753 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001754
1755Mac
1756---
1757
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001758- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1759 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001760
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001761- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1762 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001763
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001764- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1765 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1766 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001767
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001768- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001769 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1770 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001771
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001772- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1773 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001774
1775
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001776What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1777=================================
1778
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001779*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001780
1781Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001782-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001783
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001784- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1785 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1786 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1787
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001788- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1789 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1790 (SF patch #664376.)
1791
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001792- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1793 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1794 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1795 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1796 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1797 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001798 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001799
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001800- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1801 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1802 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1803 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001804 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001805
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001806- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1807 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1808 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1809 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1810 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1811 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1812 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1813 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1814 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1815 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1816 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1817
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001818- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1819 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1820 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1821 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1822 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1823 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1824
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001825- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1826 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1827
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001828- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1829 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1830 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1831 case.)
1832
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001833- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1834 passed as unicode strings.
1835
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001836- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1837 See SF bug #683467.
1838
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001839- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1840 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1841
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001842- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1843
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001844- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1845
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001846- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1847 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1848 arguments.
1849
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001850- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1851 See SF bug #667147.
1852
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001853- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001854 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001855 See SF bug #676155.
1856
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001857- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001858 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001859 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1860 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1861 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1862 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1863 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1864 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001865
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001866Extension modules
1867-----------------
1868
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001869- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1870 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1871 tp_as_number pointer.
1872
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001873- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1874 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1875 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1876 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1877 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1878
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001879- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1880
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001881- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1882
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001883- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001884 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001885 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1886 patch #678531.)
1887
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001888- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1889 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1890
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001891- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1892 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1893
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001894- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1895
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001896- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1897 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1898 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1899
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001900- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1901
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001902- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1903 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1904
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001905- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001906
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001907- datetime changes:
1908
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001909 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1910
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001911 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1912 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1913 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1914 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1915 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1916 now.
1917
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001918 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001919 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1920 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001921
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001922 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001923 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001924 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1925 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1926 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1927 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001928
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001929 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1930 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1931 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001932 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1933
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001934 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1935 by a later example coded by Guido.
1936
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001937 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001938 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1939 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1940 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001941 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1942 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1943
1944 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1945 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1946 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1947 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1948 tzinfo subclass instance.
1949
1950 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1951 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1952 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1953 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1954 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1955 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1956 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1957 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001958
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001959 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1960 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1961 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1962 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1963 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001964 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1965
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001966 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001967
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001968 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1969 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1970 as a naive datetime object.
1971
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001972 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1973 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1974 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1975
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001976 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1977 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1978 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1979 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1980 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1981 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1982 comparison.
1983
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001984 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1985 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1986 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1987 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001988 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001989
1990 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001991
1992 and ::
1993
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001994 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1995
1996 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1997 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1998 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1999 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2000
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002001 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2002 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2003 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2004 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2005 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2006
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002007 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2008 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002009 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2010 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002011
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002012Library
2013-------
2014
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002015- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2016 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2017
2018- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2019 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2020 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2021 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2022 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2023 See PEP 307 for details.
2024
2025- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2026 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2027
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002028- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2029 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002030 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002031 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2032 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002033 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002034
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002035- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2036 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2037
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002038- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2039 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2040 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2041
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002042- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2043
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002044- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2045 exception.
2046
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002047- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2048 class.
2049
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002050- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2051 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2052 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2053
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002054- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2055 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2056
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002057- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002058 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2059 See SF bug #659228.
2060
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002061- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2062 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2063 See SF patch #651082.
2064
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002065- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002066
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002067- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2068 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2069
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002070- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002071 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002072
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002073- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2074 DOS paths from other platforms.
2075
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002076Tools/Demos
2077-----------
2078
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002079- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2080 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2081 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2082 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2083 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2084 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2085 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2086 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2087 example:
2088
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002089 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2090 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002091
2092 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2093
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002094
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002095Build
2096-----
2097
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002098- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2099 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2100 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002101 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2102
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002103 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2104
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002105- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2106 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2107 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2108 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2109 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2110 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2111 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2112 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2113 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2114
2115- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2116 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2117 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2118 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2119
2120- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2121 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2122
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002123C API
2124-----
2125
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002126- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2127 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002128
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002129- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2130 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2131 tp_as_number pointer.
2132
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002133- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2134 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2135 (SF #681367)
2136
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002137- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2138 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2139 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2140 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002141
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002142Tests
2143-----
2144
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002145- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002146 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2147 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2148 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2149 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2150 pydoc.)
2151
2152- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2153
2154- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002155
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002156Windows
2157-------
2158
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002159- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2160 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2161 time).
2162
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002163- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2164 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2165
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002166- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2167 release without strong cryptography.
2168
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002169- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002170 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002171
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002172- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2173 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2174
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002175Mac
2176---
2177
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002178- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2179 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002180
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002181- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2182 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2183 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002184
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002185- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2186 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002187
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002188- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2189 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2190 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2191 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002192
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002193- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002194 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2195 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2196 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002197
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002198
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002199What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002200=================================
2201
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002202*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002203
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002204Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002205--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002206
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002207- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2208
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002209- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2210 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002211 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002212 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002213 a different meaning than before.
2214
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002215- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002216 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002217 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002218
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002219- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002220 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002221 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002222
2223- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2224 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2225 and deallocation.
2226
2227- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2228 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2229
2230- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2231 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2232 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2233 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2234 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2235
2236- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2237 now detected by the garbage collector.
2238
2239- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2240 [SF bug 519621]
2241
2242- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2243 identifier.
2244
2245- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2246 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2247 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2248 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2249 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2250 [SF bug 563060]
2251
2252- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2253 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2254 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2255 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2256 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2257
2258- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2259 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2260 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2261
2262- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2263
2264- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2265 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2266 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2267 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2268 state of the slots would be lost.)
2269
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002270Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002271-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002272
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002273- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002274 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2275 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2276 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2277 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002278 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2279 Jython 2.1.
2280
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002281- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002282 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002283 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2284 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2285 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2286 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2287 these, see PEP 302.
2288
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002289- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2290 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2291 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2292
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002293- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2294 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2295 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2296
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002297- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2298 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2299 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2300
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002301- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2302 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2303 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2304 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2305 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2306 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2307 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2308 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2309 releases or implementations.
2310
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002311- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002312 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2313 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002314
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002315- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2316 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2317
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002318- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2319 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2320 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2321
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002322- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2323 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2324
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002325- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2326 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002327 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2328 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002329
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002330- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2331 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2332 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2333 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2334 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2335
2336 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2337 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2338 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2339 pattern.
2340
2341 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2342 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2343 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2344 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2345
2346 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2347 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2348 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2349 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2350 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2351 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2352
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002353- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2354 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2355 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2356 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2357 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2358 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2359 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2360 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002361
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002362- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2363 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2364 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2365 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2366 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002367 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2368 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2369 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2370 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2371 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2372 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2373 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002374
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002375- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2376 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2377
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002378- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2379 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2380 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2381 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2382 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2383 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2384 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2385 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2386 to Zack Weinberg!
2387
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002388- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2389 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2390 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2391 type. This has been fixed now.
2392
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002393- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2394 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2395 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2396
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002397- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2398 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2399 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2400 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2401 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2402 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2403 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2404 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002405 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002406
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002407- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2408 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2409 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002410
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002411- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2412 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2413 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2414 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2415 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2416 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2417 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2418 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002419 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002420 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2421 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2422
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002423- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2424 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2425 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2426 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2427 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2428 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2429 this.)
2430
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002431- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2432 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002433 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002434 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002435 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2436 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002437 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2438 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002439
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002440- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2441 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2442 currently running.
2443
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002444- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2445 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2446 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2447 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2448
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002449- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2450 as directory names.
2451
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002452- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2453 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2454
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002455- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2456 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2457
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002458- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002459 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2460 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002461
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002462- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2463 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2464 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2465 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2466 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2467
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002468- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2469 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2470 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2471 removed.
2472
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002473- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2474 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2475 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2476
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002477- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2478 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2479 to __debug__.
2480
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002481- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2482 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2483 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2484
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002485- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2486 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2487 deprecated now.
2488
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002489- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2490 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2491 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002492
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002493- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2494 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2495 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2496 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2497 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002498
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002499- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2500 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2501
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002502- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2503 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2504 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002505 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002506 is backward compatible.
2507
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002508- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2509 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2510 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2511 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2512 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2513
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002514- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2515 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2516 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2517 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2518 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2519 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002520
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002521- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2522 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2523
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002524- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2525 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2526
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002527- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2528 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2529 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2530 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2531 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2532
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002533- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2534 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2535 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2536
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002537- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002538 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2539
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002540- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2541 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2542 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002543
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002544- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2545 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2546
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002547- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2548 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2549 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2550
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002551- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2552
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002553Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002554-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002555
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002556- Added three operators to the operator module:
2557 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2558 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2559 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2560
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002561- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2562
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002563- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2564 archives.
2565
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002566- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2567 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2568 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2569
2570 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2571
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002572- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2573 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2574 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002575 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002576
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002577- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2578 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2579 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2580 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002581 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2582 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2583 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2584 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002585
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002586- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2587 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002588
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002589- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2590
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002591- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2592 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2593
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002594- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2595 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2596 supported.
2597
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002598- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2599
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002600- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2601 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002602
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002603- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2604 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2605
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002606- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2607
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002608- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2609 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2610
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002611- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2612 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2613 functions but callable type objects.
2614
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002615- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002616 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002617 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002618
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002619- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2620 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002621
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002622- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2623 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002624
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002625- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2626 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2627 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2628 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2629
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002630- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2631 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002632
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002633- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2634 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2635 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2636 and __imul__.
2637
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002638- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002639 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2640 is called.
2641
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002642- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2643 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2644 interpreter was compiled.
2645
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002646- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2647 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2648 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002649 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002650 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2651 1, not 2.
2652
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002653- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2654 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2655 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2656 limit.
2657
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002658- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2659 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2660 bug #623464.
2661
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002662- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2663 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2664 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2665 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2666
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002667Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002668-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002669
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002670- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2671
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002672- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2673 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2674 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2675 with Python 2.3a2.
2676
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002677- os.path exposes getctime.
2678
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002679- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002680 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002681 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002682 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002683 unit tests of floating point results.
2684
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002685- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2686 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2687 has been increased.
2688
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002689- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2690 executed.
2691
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002692- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2693 postinstallation script.
2694
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002695- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2696 test the current module.
2697
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002698- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002699 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2700 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2701 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2702 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2703
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002704- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002705 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002706 Ward's Optik package.
2707
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002708- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2709 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2710 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2711 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2712
2713- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2714 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002715 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002716
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002717- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2718 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2719 shelf are binary pickles.
2720
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002721- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2722 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2723
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002724- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2725 modules are iterators now.
2726
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002727- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2728 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2729 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2730 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2731 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2732 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002733
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002734- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2735 with their entity value.
2736
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002737- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2738
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002739- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2740 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002741
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002742- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2743 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002744 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002745
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002746- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2747 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2748 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2749 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2750 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2751 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2752 main():
2753
2754 import locale
2755 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2756
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002757- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2758 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2759
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002760- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2761 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2762 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2763 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2764 to the new standard.
2765
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002766- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2767 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2768 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2769 an extension to the database.
2770
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002771- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2772 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2773 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2774 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002775 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002776
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002777- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002778 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002779
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002780- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2781 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2782 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2783 bounded integers.
2784
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002785- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2786 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2787 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2788 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2789 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2790 in existence.
2791
2792 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2793 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2794 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2795 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2796 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2797 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2798
2799 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2800 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2801 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2802 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2803
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002804- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2805 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2806 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2807
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002808- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2809
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002810- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2811 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2812 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2813 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2814
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002815- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2816 argument.
2817
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002818- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2819 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2820 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2821 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2822 [SF patch 560794].
2823
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002824- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2825 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2826 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002827 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2828 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2829 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002830
2831- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2832 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002833
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002834- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2835 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2836 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2837 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002838
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002839- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2840 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2841 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2842 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2843 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2844
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002845- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002846
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002847- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2848
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002849- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2850 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2851 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2852 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2853 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2854 identical to None.
2855
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002856- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2857 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2858 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2859 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2860 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2861 results now.
2862
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002863- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2864 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2865
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002866- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2867 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2868 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2869 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2870 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2871 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2872 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2873 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2874
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002875- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2876
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002877- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2878 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2879
2880- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2881 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2882 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2883 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2884 and other systems.
2885
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002886- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2887 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2888 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2889 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 +00002890 work well with these.
2891
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002892- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2893
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002894- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002895 connections.
2896
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002897- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2898 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2899 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2900
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002901- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2902 sets
2903
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002904- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2905 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2906 name.
2907
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002908- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2909 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2910 passed in.
2911
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002912- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002913 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002914 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2915 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002916
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002917- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2918
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002919- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2920
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002921- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2922 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2923 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2924
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002925- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2926 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2927 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2928 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002929 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002930
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002931- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002932 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002933 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002934
2935- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2936 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2937 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2938
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002939- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002940 the value of its expression argument.
2941
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002942- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2943 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2944 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2945
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002946- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2947 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2948 skipstone browser was included.
2949
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002950- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2951 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2952
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002953Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002954-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002955
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002956- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2957 names in addition to accepting file names.
2958
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002959- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2960 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2961 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2962 still used and useful.)
2963
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002964- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2965 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2966 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2967 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002968
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002969- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2970 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2971 the generated binary.
2972
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002973Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002974-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002975
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002976- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2977
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002978- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2979 except in the hands of experts.
2980
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002981- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002982 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2983 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2984 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002985
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002986- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2987 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2988 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2989 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2990 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2991 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2992 builds.
2993
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002994- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2995 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2996 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2997 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2998 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2999 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3000 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3001 new type.
3002
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003003- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003004
3005 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3006 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3007 positive infinities.
3008
3009 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3010 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3011 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3012 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3013 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3014 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3015 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3016
3017 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3018
3019 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3020
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003021- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3022 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3023 size of the executable.
3024
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003025- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3026 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3027 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3028 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003029
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003030- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3031
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003032- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3033 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3034 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003035
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003036- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3037 well as Unix.
3038
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003039- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3040 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3041 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3042 modules in the README file for details.
3043
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003044C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003045-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003046
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003047- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3048 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003049 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003050 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003051 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003052
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003053- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3054 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3055 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3056 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3057 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3058 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003059 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003060 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3061 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3062 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3063 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3064 aligned.)
3065
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003066- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3067 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3068 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3069
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003070- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3071 level.
3072
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003073- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3074 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3075 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3076 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3077 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3078
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003079- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3080 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3081 code.
3082
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003083- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3084 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3085 adjusting for negative indices.
3086
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003087- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3088 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3089 object.
3090
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003091- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3092 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3093 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3094
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003095- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3096 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003097
3098- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3099
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003100- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3101 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3102 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3103 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3104
3105- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3106
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003107- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003108
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003109- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003110 without going through the buffer API.
3111
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003113
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003114- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3115 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3116 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3117 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3118
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003119- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3120 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3121
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003122- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003123 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3124
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003125New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003127
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003128- OpenVMS is now supported.
3129
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003130- AtheOS is now supported.
3131
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003132- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3133
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003134- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3135
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003136Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-----
3138
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003139- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3140 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3141 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003142
3143Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003145
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003146- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3147 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3148 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3149 bugs.
3150 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003151 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003152 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3153 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003154 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003155
3156- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003157 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003158
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003159- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3160 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3161
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003162- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3163 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003164 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003165 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3166
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003167- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3168 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3169 use files" uninstall option).
3170
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003171- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3172
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003173- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3174 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3175
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003176- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3177 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3178 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3179
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003180- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3181 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3182 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3183 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3184 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003185 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3186 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3187 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003188
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003189- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003190 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003191 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3192 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3193 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3194 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3195 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3196 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3197 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3198 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3199 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3200 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3201 work around.
3202
3203- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3204 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3205 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3206 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3207 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3208 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3209 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3210 specified with O_CREAT too).
3211
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003212Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003213----
3214
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003215- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003216
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003217- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3218 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3219 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3220
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003221- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3222 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3223 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3224
3225- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3226 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3227 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3228 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3229 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3230 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3231 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3232 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003233
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003234- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3235 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3236 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003237
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003238- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3239 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3240 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3241 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3242 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003243
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003244- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3245 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3246 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003247
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003248- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3249 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003250
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003251- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3252 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3253 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3254 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3255 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003256
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003257- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3258 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3259 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3260
3261- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3262 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3263 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003264
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003265- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3266 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3267 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3268 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003269 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003270
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003271- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3272 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003273
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003274- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3275 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003276
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003277- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003278 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003279 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3280 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003281
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003282
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003283What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003284===============================
3285
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003286*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3287
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003288Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003289--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003290
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003291- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3292 with a custom metaclass.
3293
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003294Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003296
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003297- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3298 are proxies.
3299
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003300Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003301-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003302
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003303- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3304 very short strings.
3305
3306- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3307 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3308 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3309 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3310 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3311
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003312Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003313-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003314
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003315- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3316 close or delete time).
3317
3318- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3319 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3320
3321- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3322
3323- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003324 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003325
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003326Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003328
3329Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003331
3332C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003334
3335New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003336-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003337
3338Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003340
3341Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003342-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003343
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003344- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3345
3346- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3347 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3348
3349- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3350 deleted at process exit time.
3351
3352- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3353 in backslash.
3354
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003355Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003356----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003357
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003358- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3359 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3360 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3361
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003362
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003363What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003364===========================
3365
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003366*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3367
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003368Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003369--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003370
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003371- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3372 been extensively updated. See
3373
3374 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3375
3376 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3377
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003378- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3379 deleted!
3380
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003381- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3382 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3383 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3384 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3385 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3386
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003387- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3388
3389 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3390 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3391
3392 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3393 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3394 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3395 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3396 supported anyway.
3397
3398 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3399 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3400
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003401- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3402 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3403 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3404 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3405 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003406
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003407- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3408 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3409 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3410
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003411Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003412-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003413
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003414- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3415 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3416 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3417 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3418 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3419 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003420 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3421 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3422 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3423 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003424
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003425- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3426 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3427 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3428
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003429Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003431
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003432- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3433
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003434Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003436
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003437- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3438 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3439 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3440 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3441 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3442 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3443
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003444- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3445
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003446- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3447
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003448- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3449
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003450- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3451 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3452 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3453
3454- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3455
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003456Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003458
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003459- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3460 off a search on Google.
3461
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003462Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003463-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003464
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003465- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3466 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3467 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3468 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3469 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3470 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3471 other platforms should do likewise.
3472
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003473- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3474 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3475 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3476
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003477C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003479
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003480- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3481 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3482 producing key-value pairs.
3483
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003484- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003485 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003486 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3487 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3488 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3489 previously went unchallenged.
3490
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003491New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003492-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003493
3494Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003495-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003496
3497Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003498-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003499
3500Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003501----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003502
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003503- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3504 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003505
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003506- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3507 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3508 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3509 home.
3510
3511
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003512What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003513===========================
3514
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003515*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3516
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003517Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003518--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003519
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003520- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3521 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003522
3523 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003524 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003525
3526 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3527 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003528 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003529 This needs to be documented.
3530
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003531- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3532 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3533
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003534- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3535 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3536 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3537
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003538- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3539 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3540
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003541- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3542 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3543 class forbids it).
3544
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003545- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3546 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3547 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3548
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003549- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3550
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003551Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003553
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003554- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3555 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003556 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003557
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003558- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3559 (like 1 + '').
3560
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003561Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003563
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003564- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3565 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3566 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3567 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003568 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003569 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3570
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003571- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3572 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3573 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3574 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3575
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003576- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3577 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003578 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3579 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3580 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003581
3582- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3583 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003584
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003585- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3586 bytes on its input.
3587
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003588Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003589-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003590
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003591- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003592 convenience function.
3593
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003594- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3595 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3596 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003597 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3598 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3599 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3600 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3601 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3602 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003603
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003604- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3605 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3606 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3607 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3608
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003609- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3610 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3611 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3612
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003613- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3614 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3615 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3616 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3617
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003618- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3619 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003621 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3622 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3623 new -l and -e options.
3624
3625- statcache is now deprecated.
3626
3627- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3628 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003630 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3631 time properly taken into account.
3632
3633- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3634 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3635 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3636 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3637
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003638Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003640
3641Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003643
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003644- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3645 is built with libdb3 if available.
3646
3647- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3648
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003649C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003651
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003652- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3653 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3654 PySequence_Size().
3655
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003656- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3657
3658- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3659 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3660 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3661
3662- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3663 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3664
3665- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3666 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3667
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003668New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003670
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003671- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3672 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3673
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003674- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3675 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3676
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003677- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3678
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003679Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003681
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003682- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3683 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3684
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003685Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003686-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003687
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003688Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003689----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003690
3691- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3692 removed completely in the next release.
3693
3694- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3695 OSX.
3696
3697- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3698 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3699
3700- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3701
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003702
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003703What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003704===========================
3705
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3707
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003708Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003710
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003711- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003712 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003713 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003714 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3715 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003716 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3717 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003718 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3719 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003720
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003721- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3722 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3723
3724- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3725 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3726
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003727Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003729
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003730- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3731 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3732 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3733 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3734 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3735 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3736 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3737 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3738
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003739- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3740 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3741 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3742 example).
3743
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003744- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003745 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003746 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003747 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003748
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003749- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3750 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3751 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003752 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003753
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003754- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3755 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3756 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3757 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3758 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3759 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3760
3761 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3762
3763 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3764
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003765Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003767
3768- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3769
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003770- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3771
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003772- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3773 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003774
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003775- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3776 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3777 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3778 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3779 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3780 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003781 attributes.
3782
3783- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3784 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3785 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003786
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003787- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3788 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3789 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003790
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003791- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3792 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3793 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003794 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3795 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3796
3797- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3798 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003799
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003800Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003802
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003803- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3804 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3805
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003806- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3807 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3808 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3809 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3810
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003811- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3812 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3813 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3814 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3815
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003816 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3817 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3818 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3819 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3820 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3821 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3822 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3823 without losing information).
3824
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003825- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003826 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3827 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3828 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3829 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3830 module).
3831
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003832 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003833 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3834 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3835 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3836 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003837
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003838- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003839 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3840 encoding.
3841
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003842- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3843 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3844
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003846 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3847
3848- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3849 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3850 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3851 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3852
3853- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3854
3855- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3856 ON, and OFF.
3857
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003858- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3859 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3860
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003861Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003863
3864- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3865 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3866 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003867
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003868- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3869 been added: -X and -E.
3870
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003871Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003873
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003874- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3875 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3876
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003877C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003878-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003879
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003880- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3881 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3882 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3883 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3884 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3885
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003886- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3887 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3888 as long) arguments.
3889
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003890- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3891 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3892 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3893 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3894 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3895 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3896
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003897- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3898 input.
3899
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003900New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003901-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003902
3903Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003904-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003905
3906Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003908
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003909- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3910 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3911 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3912
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003913- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3914 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3915 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003916 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003917
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3919 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3920 import signal
3921 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003924 while 1:
3925 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003927 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3928 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3929 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3930 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003931
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003932
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003933What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3934===========================
3935
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3937
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003938Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003940
3941- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3942 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3943 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3944
3945- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3946 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3947 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3948 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3949 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3950 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3951 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003952
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003953- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003954 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003955 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3956 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3957 associate a docstring with a property.
3958
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003959- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3960 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3961 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3962 other built-in object types.
3963
3964- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3965 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3966 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3967 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3968 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3969
3970- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3971 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3972
3973- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3974 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003975 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003976 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3977 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3978 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3979 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3980 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3981
3982- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3983 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3984 class.
3985
3986- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3987 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3988 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3989 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3990
3991- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3992 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3993 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3994 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3995
3996- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3997 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3998
3999- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4000 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4001 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4002 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4003 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004004 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004005 with the same value as s.
4006
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004007- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4008
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004009Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004011
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004012- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4013
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004014- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4015 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4016 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4017 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4018 objects.
4019
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004020- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4021 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004022 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4023 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4024
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004025- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4026 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4027 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4028
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004029Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004031
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004032- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4033 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4034 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4035 by the instances.
4036
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004037- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4038 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4039 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4040
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004041- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4042 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4043 before the entire comparison is complete.
4044
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004045- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4046 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4047 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4048
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004049- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4050 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4051 getwriter().
4052
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004053- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4054 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4055
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004056- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004057 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4058 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4059
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004060- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4061 iterable object.
4062
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004063- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4064 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004065
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004066- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4067 authentication.
4068
4069- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4070 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004071
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004072- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004073 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4074 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4075 a sample driver.)
4076
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004077Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004079
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004080- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4081 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4082 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4083 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4084 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4085 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4086 kernel has large file support.
4087
4088- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4089 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4090 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4091 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4092 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4093
4094- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4095 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4096 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4097
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004098C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004100
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004101- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4102 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4103
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004104New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004106
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004107- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4108 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4109
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004110Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004112
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004113- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4114 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4115 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4116 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4117 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4118
4119- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4120 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4121 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4122 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4123
4124- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4125 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4126
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004127Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004129
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004130- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004131 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4132 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004133
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004134
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004135What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4136===========================
4137
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4139
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004140Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004142
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004143- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4144 big to represent as a C double.
4145
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004146- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4147 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4148 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4149 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4150 restriction).
4151
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004152- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4153 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4154 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4155 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4156 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4157
4158 >>> dir([])
4159 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4160 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4161 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4162 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4163 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4164 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4165 'reverse', 'sort']
4166
4167 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4168
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004169- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004170 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4171 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4172 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4173 OverflowError exception.
4174
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004175- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004176 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004177 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4178 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4179 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4180 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4181 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004182 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4184 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4185
4186 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4187 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4188 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4189 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004190
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004191- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004192 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4193 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4194 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4195 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4196 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4197 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4198 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4199 once it is created.
4200
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004201- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4202 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4203 (key, value) pairs.
4204
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004205- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004206 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4207 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4208
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004209- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4210 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4211 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4212 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4213 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004214
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004215- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004216 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4217 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4218
4219 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4220
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004221- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004222 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4223
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004224Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004226
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004227- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004228 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4229 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004230
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004231- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4232 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4233 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4234 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4235 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4236 in this area anymore).
4237
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004238- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4239 threading.Timer.
4240
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004241- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4242 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4243
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004244- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004245 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4246
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004247- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004248 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4249 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4250 converted to Python longs.
4251
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004252- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004253 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4254
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004255- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4256 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4257 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4258
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004259Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004261
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004262- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4263 division operators as per PEP 238.
4264
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004265Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004267
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004268- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4269 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4270 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4271 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4272
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004273C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004275
4276- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004277
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004278- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4279 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004280 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004281
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4283 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004284 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004286
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004287- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004288 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4289 module:
4290
4291 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004292
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004293 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4294 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004295
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004296 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4297 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004298
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004299 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4300
4301 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4302
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004303- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004304 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4305 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4306 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004307
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004308New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004310
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004311- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4312 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4313 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4314 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4315 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004316
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004317Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004319
4320Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004322
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004323- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4324 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4325 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4326 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004327 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4328 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4329 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4330 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4331 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004332
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004333- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004334 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4335
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004336
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004337What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4338===========================
4339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4341
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004342Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004344
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004345- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4346 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4347
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004348- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4349 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4350 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004351
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004352- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4353 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4354 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4355 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004356
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004357- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4358
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004360
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004361Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004363
4364- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004365 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004366 the module docstring for details.
4367
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004368Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004370
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004371- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004372 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4373 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4374 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004375
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004376- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4377 Nick Mathewson.
4378
4379Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004380----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004381
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004382- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4383 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4384 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4385 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4386 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4387 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4388 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4389 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4390
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004391- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4392 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4393 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4394 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4395
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004396- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4397 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4398 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4399 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4400 come a long way).
4401
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004402- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4403 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4404 write filters for these warnings).
4405
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004406- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4407 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4408 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4409 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4410 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4411
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004412- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4413 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4414 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4415 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4416 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4417 older distribution.
4418
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004419Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004421
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004422- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4423 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004424 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004425
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004426- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4427 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4428 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4429
4430- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4431
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004432- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4433
4434- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4435
4436- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4437
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004438- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004439
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004440- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4441
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004442New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004444
4445C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004447
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004448- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4449 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4450 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4451 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4452 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4453 against buffer overruns.
4454
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004455- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004456 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4457 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004458 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4459 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4460 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4461
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004462- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4463 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4464 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4465 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4466 deprecated.
4467
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004468Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004470
4471- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4472 relevant is found.
4473
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004474
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004475What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004476===========================
4477
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4479
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004480Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004482
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004483- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4484 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4485 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4486 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4487 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4488 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4489 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4490 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004491 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004492 repaired.
4493
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004494- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004495 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004496 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4497 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4498 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4499 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4500 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4501 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4502 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4503 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4504
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004505- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4506 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4507 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4508 leading BMO character).
4509
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004510- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4511 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4512 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4513
4514 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4515 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4516 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004517
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004518 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4519 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4520 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4521 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4522 for various simple to use conversions.
4523
4524 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4525 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4526
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4528 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4529 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4530 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4531 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4532 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4533 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4534 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4535 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4536 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4537 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4538 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4539 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4540 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4541 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004542
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004543- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4544 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4545 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004546 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004547 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004548
4549 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004550 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4551 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4552 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4553 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4554 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004555 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4556 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004557
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004558 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4559 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4560 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004561 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004562
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004563- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4564 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4565 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4566 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4567 floating arithmetic,
4568
4569 x = 9007199254740992.0
4570 print long(x)
4571
4572 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4573 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4574 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4575 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4576 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4577 functions are of good quality).
4578
4579 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4580 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4581 algorithms to break.
4582
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004583- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4584 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4585 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4586 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4587 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4588 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4589 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4590 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4591 order.
4592
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004593- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4594 operation along the most common code paths.
4595
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004596- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4597 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4598
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004599- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4600 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4601 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4602 {}.update(UserDict())
4603
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004604- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4605 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4606 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4607 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4608 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4609 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4610 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4611 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4612
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004613- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004614 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004616 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004617 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4618 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004619 join() method of strings
4620 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004621 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4622 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004624 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004625
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004626- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4627 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4628
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004629- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4630 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4631
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004632- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4633 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4634 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4635 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4636
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004637- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4638 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004639 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004640 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4641 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004642
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004643- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4644
4645
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004646Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004648
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004649- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004650 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004651 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4652 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4653
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004654- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4655 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4656
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004657- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4658 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4659 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4660 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4661
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004662- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4663 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4664 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4665
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004666- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4667
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004668- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4669
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004670- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4671 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4672 that are still imported into string.py).
4673
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004674- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4675
4676- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4677 Now it does.
4678
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004679- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4680
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004681- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4682 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4683 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4684 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4685 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004686 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4687 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004688
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004689- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4690 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4691 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4692 'help(object)'.
4693
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004694Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004696
4697- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004698 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004699 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4700 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4701
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004702- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004703 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4704 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004705
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004706C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004708
4709- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4710 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711
4712----
4713
4714**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**