blob: 72513863ba9758d7ab4533ebfd9301369b7ff88f [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +000010*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +000015- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
16 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
17
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +000018- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
19 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
20 and cannot be strings).
21
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +000022- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
23 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
24 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
25 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
26
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +000027- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
28 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
29 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
30 Python itself.
31
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000032- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
33 the referenced object, if it has one.
34
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000035- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
36 the thread started at
37 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
38
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000039- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
40 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
41 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
42 placed on a list index.
43
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000044- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
45 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
46 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
47 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
48
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000049- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
50 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
51 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
52 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
53 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
54 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
55 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
56
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000057- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
58 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
59 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
60 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
61 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
62
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000063- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
64 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000065
66- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
67 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
68 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
69 #693195.)
70
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000071- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
72 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000073
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000074- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000075 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000076 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
77 interpreter executions, would fail.
78
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000079- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000080 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000081 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000082
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000083Extension modules
84-----------------
85
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +000086- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
87 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
88 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
89 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
90
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +000091- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
92 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
93
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +000094- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
95 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
96 and Greg Chapman.)
97
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000098- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
99 recursively.
100
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000101- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000102 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
103 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
104 leaks.
105
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000106- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
107
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000108- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
109 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
110 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
111 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
112 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
113 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
114 #705836.
115
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000116- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
117 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
118
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000119- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
120 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
121 See SF bug #692416.
122
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000123- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
124 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
125
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000126- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
127 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
128 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000129
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000130- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000131 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
132 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
133
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000134- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
135 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
136 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
137 timeouts to work properly.
138
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000139Library
140-------
141
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000142- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
143 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
144 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
145 future release.
146
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000147- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
148 for querying platform dependent features.
149
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000150- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000151
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000152- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
153 pickle protocol versions.
154
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000155- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
156 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
157 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
158
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000159- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
160
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000161- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
162 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
163 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
164 modules.
165
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000166- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
167 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
168 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
169
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000170- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
171 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
172
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000173- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
174 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
175 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
176
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000177- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000178 MS Office extensions.
179
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000180- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
181 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
182
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000183- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
184 execution speed of expressions and statements.
185
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000186- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
187 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
188 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
189 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
190 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
191 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
192
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000193- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
194 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
195 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000196
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000197- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
198 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
199 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
200
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000201- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
202
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000203- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
204 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
205 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
206
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000207Tools/Demos
208-----------
209
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000210- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
211 See the module docstring for details.
212
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000213Build
214-----
215
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000216- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
217 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000218
219C API
220-----
221
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000222- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
223
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000224- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
225 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
226 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
227
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000228- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
229 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000230
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000231 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
232 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
233 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000234
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000235- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000236 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
237
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000238- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
239 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
240 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000241
242New platforms
243-------------
244
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000245None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000246
247Tests
248-----
249
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000250- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
251 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000252
253Windows
254-------
255
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000256- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
257 function.
258
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000259- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
260 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000261
262Mac
263---
264
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000265- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
266 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000267
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000268- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
269 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000270
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000271- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
272 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
273 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000274
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000275- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000276 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
277 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000278
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000279- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
280 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000281
282
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000283What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
284=================================
285
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000286*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000287
288Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000289-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000290
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000291- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
292 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
293 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
294
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000295- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
296 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
297 (SF patch #664376.)
298
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000299- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
300 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
301 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
302 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
303 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
304 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000305 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000306
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000307- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
308 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
309 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
310 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000311 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000312
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000313- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
314 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
315 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
316 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
317 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
318 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
319 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
320 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
321 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
322 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
323 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
324
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000325- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
326 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
327 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
328 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
329 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
330 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
331
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000332- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
333 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
334
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000335- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
336 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
337 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
338 case.)
339
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000340- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
341 passed as unicode strings.
342
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000343- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
344 See SF bug #683467.
345
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000346- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
347 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
348
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000349- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
350
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000351- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
352
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000353- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
354 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
355 arguments.
356
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000357- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
358 See SF bug #667147.
359
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000360- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000361 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000362 See SF bug #676155.
363
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000364- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000365 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000366 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
367 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
368 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
369 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
370 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
371 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000372
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000373Extension modules
374-----------------
375
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000376- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
377 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
378 tp_as_number pointer.
379
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000380- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
381 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
382 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
383 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
384 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
385
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000386- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
387
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000388- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
389
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000390- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000391 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000392 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
393 patch #678531.)
394
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000395- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
396 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
397
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000398- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
399 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
400
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000401- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
402
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000403- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
404 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
405 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
406
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000407- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
408
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000409- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
410 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
411
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000412- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000413
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000414- datetime changes:
415
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000416 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
417
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000418 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
419 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
420 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
421 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
422 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
423 now.
424
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000425 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000426 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
427 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000428
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000429 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000430 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000431 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
432 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
433 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
434 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000435
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000436 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
437 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
438 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000439 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
440
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000441 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
442 by a later example coded by Guido.
443
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000444 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000445 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
446 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
447 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000448 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
449 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
450
451 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
452 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
453 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
454 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
455 tzinfo subclass instance.
456
457 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
458 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
459 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
460 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
461 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
462 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
463 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
464 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000465
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000466 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
467 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
468 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
469 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
470 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000471 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
472
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000473 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000474
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000475 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
476 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
477 as a naive datetime object.
478
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000479 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
480 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
481 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
482
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000483 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
484 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
485 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
486 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
487 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
488 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
489 comparison.
490
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000491 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
492 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
493 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
494 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000495 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000496
497 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000498
499 and ::
500
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000501 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
502
503 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
504 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
505 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
506 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
507
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000508 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
509 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
510 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
511 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
512 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
513
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000514 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
515 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000516 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
517 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000518
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000519Library
520-------
521
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000522- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
523 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
524
525- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
526 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
527 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
528 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
529 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
530 See PEP 307 for details.
531
532- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
533 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
534
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000535- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
536 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000537 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000538 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
539 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000540 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000541
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000542- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
543 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
544
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000545- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
546 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
547 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
548
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000549- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
550
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000551- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
552 exception.
553
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000554- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
555 class.
556
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000557- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
558 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
559 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
560
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000561- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
562 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
563
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000564- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000565 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
566 See SF bug #659228.
567
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000568- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
569 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
570 See SF patch #651082.
571
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000572- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000573
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000574- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
575 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
576
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000577- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000578 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000579
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000580- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
581 DOS paths from other platforms.
582
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000583Tools/Demos
584-----------
585
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000586- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
587 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
588 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
589 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
590 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
591 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
592 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
593 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
594 example:
595
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000596 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
597 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000598
599 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
600
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000601
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000602Build
603-----
604
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000605- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
606 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
607 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000608 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
609
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000610 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
611
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000612- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
613 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
614 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
615 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
616 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
617 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
618 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
619 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
620 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
621
622- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
623 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
624 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
625 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
626
627- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
628 from the Tools/scripts directory.
629
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000630C API
631-----
632
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000633- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
634 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000635
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000636- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
637 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
638 tp_as_number pointer.
639
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000640- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
641 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
642 (SF #681367)
643
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000644- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
645 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
646 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
647 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000648
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000649Tests
650-----
651
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000652- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000653 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
654 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
655 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
656 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
657 pydoc.)
658
659- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
660
661- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000662
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000663Windows
664-------
665
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000666- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
667 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
668 time).
669
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000670- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
671 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
672
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000673- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
674 release without strong cryptography.
675
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000676- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000677 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000678
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000679- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
680 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
681
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000682Mac
683---
684
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000685- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
686 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000687
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000688- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
689 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
690 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000691
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000692- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
693 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000694
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000695- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
696 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
697 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
698 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000699
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000700- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000701 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
702 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
703 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000704
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000705
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000706What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000707=================================
708
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000709*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000710
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000711Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000712--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000713
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000714- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
715
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000716- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
717 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000718 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000719 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000720 a different meaning than before.
721
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000722- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000723 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000724 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000725
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000726- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000727 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000728 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000729
730- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
731 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
732 and deallocation.
733
734- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
735 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
736
737- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
738 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
739 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
740 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
741 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
742
743- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
744 now detected by the garbage collector.
745
746- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
747 [SF bug 519621]
748
749- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
750 identifier.
751
752- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
753 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
754 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
755 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
756 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
757 [SF bug 563060]
758
759- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
760 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
761 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
762 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
763 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
764
765- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
766 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
767 not called. [SF bug #537450]
768
769- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
770
771- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
772 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
773 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
774 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
775 state of the slots would be lost.)
776
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000777Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000778-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000779
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000780- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000781 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
782 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
783 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
784 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000785 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
786 Jython 2.1.
787
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000788- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000789 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000790 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
791 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
792 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
793 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
794 these, see PEP 302.
795
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000796- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
797 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
798 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
799
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000800- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
801 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
802 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
803
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000804- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
805 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
806 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
807
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000808- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
809 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
810 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
811 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
812 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
813 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
814 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
815 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
816 releases or implementations.
817
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000818- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000819 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
820 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000821
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000822- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
823 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
824
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000825- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
826 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
827 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
828
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000829- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
830 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
831
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000832- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
833 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000834 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
835 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000836
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000837- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
838 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
839 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
840 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
841 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
842
843 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
844 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
845 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
846 pattern.
847
848 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
849 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
850 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
851 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
852
853 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
854 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
855 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
856 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
857 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
858 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
859
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000860- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
861 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
862 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
863 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
864 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
865 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
866 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
867 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000868
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000869- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
870 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
871 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
872 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
873 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000874 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
875 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
876 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
877 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
878 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
879 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
880 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000881
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000882- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
883 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
884
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000885- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
886 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
887 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
888 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
889 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
890 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
891 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
892 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
893 to Zack Weinberg!
894
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000895- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
896 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
897 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
898 type. This has been fixed now.
899
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000900- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
901 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
902 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
903
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000904- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
905 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
906 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
907 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
908 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
909 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
910 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
911 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000912 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000913
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000914- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
915 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
916 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000917
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000918- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
919 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
920 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
921 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
922 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
923 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
924 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
925 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000926 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000927 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
928 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
929
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000930- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
931 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
932 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
933 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
934 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
935 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
936 this.)
937
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000938- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
939 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000940 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000941 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000942 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
943 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000944 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
945 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000946
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000947- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
948 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
949 currently running.
950
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000951- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
952 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
953 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
954 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
955
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000956- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
957 as directory names.
958
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000959- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
960 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
961
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000962- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
963 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
964
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000965- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000966 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
967 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000968
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000969- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
970 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
971 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
972 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
973 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
974
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000975- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
976 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
977 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
978 removed.
979
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000980- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
981 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
982 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
983
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000984- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
985 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
986 to __debug__.
987
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000988- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
989 string to the left with zeros. For example,
990 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
991
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000992- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
993 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
994 deprecated now.
995
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000996- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
997 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
998 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000999
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001000- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1001 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1002 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1003 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1004 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001005
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001006- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1007 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1008
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001009- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1010 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1011 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001012 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001013 is backward compatible.
1014
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001015- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1016 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1017 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1018 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1019 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1020
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001021- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1022 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1023 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1024 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1025 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1026 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001027
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001028- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1029 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1030
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001031- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1032 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1033
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001034- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1035 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1036 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1037 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1038 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1039
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001040- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1041 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1042 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1043
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001044- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001045 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1046
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001047- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1048 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1049 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001050
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001051- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1052 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1053
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001054- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1055 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1056 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1057
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001058- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1059
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001060Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001061-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001062
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001063- Added three operators to the operator module:
1064 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1065 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1066 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1067
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001068- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1069
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001070- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1071 archives.
1072
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001073- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1074 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1075 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1076
1077 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1078
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001079- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1080 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1081 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001082 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001083
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001084- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1085 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1086 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1087 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001088 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1089 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1090 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1091 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001092
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001093- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1094 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001095
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001096- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1097
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001098- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1099 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1100
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001101- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1102 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1103 supported.
1104
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001105- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1106
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001107- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1108 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001109
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001110- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1111 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1112
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001113- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1114
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001115- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1116 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1117
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001118- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1119 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1120 functions but callable type objects.
1121
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001122- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001123 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001124 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001125
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001126- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1127 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001128
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001129- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1130 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001131
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001132- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1133 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1134 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1135 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1136
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001137- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1138 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001139
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001140- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1141 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1142 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1143 and __imul__.
1144
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001145- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001146 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1147 is called.
1148
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001149- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1150 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1151 interpreter was compiled.
1152
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001153- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1154 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1155 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001156 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001157 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1158 1, not 2.
1159
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001160- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1161 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1162 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1163 limit.
1164
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001165- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1166 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1167 bug #623464.
1168
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001169- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1170 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1171 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1172 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1173
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001174Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001175-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001176
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001177- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1178
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001179- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1180 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1181 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1182 with Python 2.3a2.
1183
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001184- os.path exposes getctime.
1185
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001186- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001187 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001188 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001189 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001190 unit tests of floating point results.
1191
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001192- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1193 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1194 has been increased.
1195
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001196- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1197 executed.
1198
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001199- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1200 postinstallation script.
1201
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001202- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1203 test the current module.
1204
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001205- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001206 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1207 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1208 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1209 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1210
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001211- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001212 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001213 Ward's Optik package.
1214
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001215- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1216 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1217 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1218 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1219
1220- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1221 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001222 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001223
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001224- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1225 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1226 shelf are binary pickles.
1227
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001228- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1229 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1230
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001231- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1232 modules are iterators now.
1233
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001234- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1235 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1236 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1237 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1238 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1239 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001240
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001241- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1242 with their entity value.
1243
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001244- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1245
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001246- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1247 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001248
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001249- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1250 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001251 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001252
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001253- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1254 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1255 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1256 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1257 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1258 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1259 main():
1260
1261 import locale
1262 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1263
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001264- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1265 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1266
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001267- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1268 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1269 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1270 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1271 to the new standard.
1272
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001273- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1274 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1275 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1276 an extension to the database.
1277
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001278- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1279 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1280 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1281 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001282 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001283
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001284- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001285 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001286
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001287- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1288 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1289 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1290 bounded integers.
1291
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001292- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1293 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1294 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1295 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1296 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1297 in existence.
1298
1299 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1300 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1301 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1302 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1303 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1304 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1305
1306 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1307 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1308 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1309 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1310
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001311- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1312 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1313 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1314
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001315- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1316
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001317- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1318 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1319 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1320 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1321
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001322- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1323 argument.
1324
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001325- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1326 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1327 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1328 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1329 [SF patch 560794].
1330
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001331- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1332 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1333 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001334 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1335 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1336 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001337
1338- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1339 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001340
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001341- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1342 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1343 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1344 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001345
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001346- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1347 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1348 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1349 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1350 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1351
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001352- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001353
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001354- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1355
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001356- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1357 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1358 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1359 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1360 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1361 identical to None.
1362
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001363- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1364 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1365 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1366 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1367 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1368 results now.
1369
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001370- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1371 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1372
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001373- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1374 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1375 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1376 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1377 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1378 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1379 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1380 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1381
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001382- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1383
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001384- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1385 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1386
1387- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1388 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1389 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1390 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1391 and other systems.
1392
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001393- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1394 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1395 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1396 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 +00001397 work well with these.
1398
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001399- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1400
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001401- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001402 connections.
1403
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001404- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1405 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1406 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1407
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001408- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1409 sets
1410
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001411- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1412 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1413 name.
1414
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001415- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1416 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1417 passed in.
1418
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001419- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001420 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001421 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1422 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001423
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001424- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1425
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001426- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1427
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001428- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1429 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1430 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1431
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001432- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1433 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1434 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1435 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001436 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001437
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001438- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001439 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001440 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001441
1442- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1443 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1444 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1445
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001446- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001447 the value of its expression argument.
1448
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001449- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1450 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1451 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1452
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001453- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1454 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1455 skipstone browser was included.
1456
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001457- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1458 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1459
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001460Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001461-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001462
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001463- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1464 names in addition to accepting file names.
1465
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001466- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1467 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1468 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1469 still used and useful.)
1470
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001471- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1472 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1473 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1474 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001475
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001476- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1477 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1478 the generated binary.
1479
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001480Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001481-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001482
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001483- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1484
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001485- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1486 except in the hands of experts.
1487
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001488- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001489 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1490 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1491 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001492
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001493- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1494 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1495 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1496 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1497 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1498 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1499 builds.
1500
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001501- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1502 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1503 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1504 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1505 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1506 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1507 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1508 new type.
1509
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001510- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001511
1512 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1513 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1514 positive infinities.
1515
1516 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1517 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1518 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1519 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1520 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1521 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1522 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1523
1524 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1525
1526 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1527
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001528- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1529 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1530 size of the executable.
1531
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001532- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1533 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1534 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1535 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001536
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001537- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1538
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001539- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1540 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1541 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001542
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001543- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1544 well as Unix.
1545
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001546- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1547 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1548 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1549 modules in the README file for details.
1550
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001551C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001552-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001553
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001554- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1555 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001556 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001557 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001558 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001559
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001560- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1561 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1562 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1563 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1564 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1565 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001566 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001567 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1568 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1569 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1570 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1571 aligned.)
1572
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001573- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1574 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1575 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1576
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001577- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1578 level.
1579
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001580- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1581 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1582 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1583 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1584 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1585
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001586- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1587 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1588 code.
1589
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001590- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1591 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1592 adjusting for negative indices.
1593
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001594- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1595 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1596 object.
1597
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001598- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1599 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1600 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1601
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001602- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1603 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001604
1605- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1606
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001607- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1608 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1609 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1610 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1611
1612- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1613
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001614- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001615
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001616- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001617 without going through the buffer API.
1618
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001619- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001620
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001621- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1622 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1623 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1624 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1625
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001626- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1627 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1628
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001629- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001630 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1631
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001632New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001633-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001634
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001635- OpenVMS is now supported.
1636
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001637- AtheOS is now supported.
1638
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001639- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1640
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001641- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1642
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001643Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001644-----
1645
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001646- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1647 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1648 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001649
1650Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001651-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001652
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001653- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1654 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1655 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1656 bugs.
1657 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001658 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001659 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1660 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001661 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001662
1663- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001664 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001665
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001666- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1667 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1668
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001669- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1670 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001671 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001672 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1673
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001674- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1675 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1676 use files" uninstall option).
1677
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001678- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1679
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001680- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1681 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1682
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001683- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1684 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1685 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1686
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001687- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1688 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1689 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1690 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1691 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001692 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1693 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1694 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001695
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001696- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001697 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001698 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1699 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1700 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1701 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1702 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1703 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1704 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1705 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1706 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1707 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1708 work around.
1709
1710- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1711 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1712 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1713 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1714 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1715 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1716 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1717 specified with O_CREAT too).
1718
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001719Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001720----
1721
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001722- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001723
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001724- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1725 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1726 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1727
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001728- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1729 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1730 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1731
1732- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1733 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1734 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1735 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1736 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1737 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1738 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1739 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001740
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001741- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1742 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1743 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001744
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001745- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1746 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1747 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1748 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1749 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001750
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001751- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1752 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1753 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001754
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001755- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1756 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001757
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001758- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1759 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1760 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1761 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1762 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001763
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001764- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1765 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1766 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1767
1768- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1769 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1770 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001771
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001772- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1773 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1774 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1775 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001776 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001777
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001778- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1779 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001780
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001781- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1782 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001783
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001784- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001785 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001786 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1787 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001788
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001789
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001790What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001791===============================
1792
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001793*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1794
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001795Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001796--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001797
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001798- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1799 with a custom metaclass.
1800
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001801Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001802-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001803
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001804- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1805 are proxies.
1806
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001807Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001808-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001809
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001810- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1811 very short strings.
1812
1813- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1814 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1815 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1816 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1817 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1818
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001819Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001820-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001821
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001822- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1823 close or delete time).
1824
1825- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1826 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1827
1828- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1829
1830- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001831 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001832
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001833Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001834-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001835
1836Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001837-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001838
1839C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001840-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001841
1842New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001843-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001844
1845Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001846-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001847
1848Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001849-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001850
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001851- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1852
1853- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1854 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1855
1856- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1857 deleted at process exit time.
1858
1859- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1860 in backslash.
1861
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001862Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001863----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001864
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001865- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1866 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1867 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1868
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001869
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001870What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001871===========================
1872
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001873*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1874
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001875Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001876--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001877
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001878- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1879 been extensively updated. See
1880
1881 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1882
1883 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1884
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001885- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1886 deleted!
1887
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001888- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1889 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1890 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1891 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1892 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1893
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001894- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1895
1896 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1897 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1898
1899 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1900 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1901 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1902 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1903 supported anyway.
1904
1905 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1906 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1907
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001908- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1909 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1910 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1911 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1912 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001913
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001914- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1915 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1916 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1917
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001918Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001919-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001920
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001921- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1922 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1923 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1924 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1925 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1926 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001927 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1928 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1929 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1930 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001931
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001932- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1933 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1934 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1935
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001936Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001937-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001938
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001939- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1940
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001941Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001942-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001943
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001944- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1945 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1946 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1947 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1948 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1949 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1950
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001951- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1952
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001953- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1954
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001955- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1956
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001957- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1958 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1959 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1960
1961- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1962
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001963Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001964-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001965
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001966- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1967 off a search on Google.
1968
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001969Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001970-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001971
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001972- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1973 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1974 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1975 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1976 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1977 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1978 other platforms should do likewise.
1979
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001980- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1981 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1982 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1983
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001984C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001985-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001986
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001987- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1988 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1989 producing key-value pairs.
1990
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001991- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001992 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001993 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1994 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1995 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1996 previously went unchallenged.
1997
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001998New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001999-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002000
2001Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002002-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002003
2004Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002005-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002006
2007Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002008----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002009
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002010- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2011 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002012
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002013- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2014 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2015 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2016 home.
2017
2018
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002019What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002020===========================
2021
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002022*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2023
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002024Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002025--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002026
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002027- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2028 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002029
2030 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002031 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002032
2033 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2034 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002035 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002036 This needs to be documented.
2037
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002038- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2039 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2040
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002041- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2042 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2043 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2044
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002045- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2046 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2047
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002048- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2049 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2050 class forbids it).
2051
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002052- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2053 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2054 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2055
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002056- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2057
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002058Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002059-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002060
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002061- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2062 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002063 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002064
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002065- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2066 (like 1 + '').
2067
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002068Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002069-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002070
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002071- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2072 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2073 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2074 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002075 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002076 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2077
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002078- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2079 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2080 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2081 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2082
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002083- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2084 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002085 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2086 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2087 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002088
2089- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2090 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002091
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002092- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2093 bytes on its input.
2094
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002095Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002096-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002097
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002098- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002099 convenience function.
2100
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002101- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2102 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2103 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002104 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2105 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2106 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2107 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2108 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2109 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002110
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002111- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2112 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2113 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2114 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2115
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002116- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2117 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2118 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2119
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002120- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2121 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2122 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2123 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2124
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002125- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2126 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002127 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002128 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2129 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2130 new -l and -e options.
2131
2132- statcache is now deprecated.
2133
2134- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2135 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002136 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002137 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2138 time properly taken into account.
2139
2140- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2141 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2142 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2143 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2144
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002145Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002147
2148Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002149-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002150
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002151- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2152 is built with libdb3 if available.
2153
2154- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2155
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002156C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002157-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002158
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002159- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2160 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2161 PySequence_Size().
2162
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002163- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2164
2165- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2166 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2167 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2168
2169- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2170 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2171
2172- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2173 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2174
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002175New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002176-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002177
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002178- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2179 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2180
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002181- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2182 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2183
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002184- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2185
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002186Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002187-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002188
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002189- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2190 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2191
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002192Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002193-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002194
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002195Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002196----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002197
2198- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2199 removed completely in the next release.
2200
2201- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2202 OSX.
2203
2204- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2205 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2206
2207- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2208
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002209
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002210What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002211===========================
2212
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002213*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2214
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002215Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002216--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002217
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002218- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002219 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002220 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002221 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2222 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002223 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2224 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002225 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2226 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002227
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002228- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2229 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2230
2231- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2232 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2233
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002234Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002235-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002236
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002237- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2238 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2239 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2240 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2241 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2242 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2243 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2244 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2245
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002246- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2247 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2248 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2249 example).
2250
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002251- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002252 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002253 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002254 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002255
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002256- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2257 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2258 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002259 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002260
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002261- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2262 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2263 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2264 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2265 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2266 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2267
2268 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2269
2270 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2271
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002272Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002273-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002274
2275- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2276
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002277- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2278
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002279- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2280 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002281
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002282- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2283 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2284 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2285 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2286 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2287 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002288 attributes.
2289
2290- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2291 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2292 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002293
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002294- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2295 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2296 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002297
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002298- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2299 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2300 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002301 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2302 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2303
2304- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2305 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002306
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002307Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002308-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002309
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002310- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2311 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2312
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002313- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2314 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2315 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2316 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2317
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002318- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2319 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2320 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2321 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2322
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002323 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2324 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2325 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2326 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2327 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2328 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2329 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2330 without losing information).
2331
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002332- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002333 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2334 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2335 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2336 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2337 module).
2338
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002339 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002340 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2341 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2342 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2343 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002344
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002345- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002346 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2347 encoding.
2348
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002349- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2350 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2351
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002352- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002353 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2354
2355- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2356 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2357 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2358 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2359
2360- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2361
2362- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2363 ON, and OFF.
2364
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002365- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2366 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2367
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002368Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002369-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002370
2371- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2372 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2373 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002374
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002375- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2376 been added: -X and -E.
2377
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002378Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002379-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002380
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002381- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2382 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2383
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002384C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002385-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002386
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002387- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2388 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2389 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2390 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2391 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2392
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002393- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2394 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2395 as long) arguments.
2396
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002397- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2398 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2399 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2400 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2401 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2402 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2403
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002404- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2405 input.
2406
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002407New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002408-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002409
2410Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002411-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002412
2413Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002414-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002415
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002416- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2417 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2418 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2419
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002420- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2421 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2422 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002423 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002424
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002425 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2426 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2427 import signal
2428 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002429
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002430 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002431 while 1:
2432 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002433 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002434 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2435 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2436 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2437 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002438
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002439
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002440What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2441===========================
2442
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002443*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2444
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002445Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002446--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002447
2448- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2449 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2450 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2451
2452- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2453 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2454 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2455 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2456 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2457 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2458 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002459
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002460- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002461 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002462 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2463 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2464 associate a docstring with a property.
2465
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002466- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2467 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2468 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2469 other built-in object types.
2470
2471- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2472 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2473 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2474 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2475 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2476
2477- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2478 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2479
2480- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2481 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002482 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002483 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2484 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2485 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2486 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2487 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2488
2489- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2490 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2491 class.
2492
2493- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2494 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2495 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2496 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2497
2498- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2499 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2500 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2501 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2502
2503- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2504 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2505
2506- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2507 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2508 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2509 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2510 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002511 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002512 with the same value as s.
2513
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002514- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2515
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002516Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002517----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002518
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002519- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2520
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002521- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2522 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2523 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2524 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2525 objects.
2526
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002527- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2528 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002529 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2530 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2531
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002532- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2533 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2534 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2535
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002536Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002537-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002538
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002539- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2540 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2541 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2542 by the instances.
2543
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002544- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2545 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2546 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2547
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002548- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2549 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2550 before the entire comparison is complete.
2551
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002552- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2553 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2554 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2555
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002556- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2557 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2558 getwriter().
2559
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002560- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2561 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2562
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002563- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002564 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2565 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2566
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002567- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2568 iterable object.
2569
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002570- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2571 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002572
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002573- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2574 authentication.
2575
2576- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2577 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002578
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002579- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002580 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2581 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2582 a sample driver.)
2583
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002584Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002586
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002587- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2588 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2589 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2590 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2591 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2592 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2593 kernel has large file support.
2594
2595- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2596 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2597 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2598 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2599 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2600
2601- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2602 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2603 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2604
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002605C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002607
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002608- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2609 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2610
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002611New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002612-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002613
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002614- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2615 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2616
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002617Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002619
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002620- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2621 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2622 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2623 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2624 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2625
2626- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2627 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2628 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2629 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2630
2631- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2632 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2633
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002634Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002635-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002636
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002637- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002638 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2639 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002640
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002641
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002642What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2643===========================
2644
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002645*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2646
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002647Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002649
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002650- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2651 big to represent as a C double.
2652
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002653- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2654 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2655 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2656 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2657 restriction).
2658
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002659- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2660 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2661 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2662 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2663 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2664
2665 >>> dir([])
2666 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2667 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2668 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2669 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2670 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2671 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2672 'reverse', 'sort']
2673
2674 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2675
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002676- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002677 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2678 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2679 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2680 OverflowError exception.
2681
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002682- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002683 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002684 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2685 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2686 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2687 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2688 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002689 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002690 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2691 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2692
2693 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2694 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2695 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2696 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002697
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002698- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002699 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2700 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2701 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2702 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2703 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2704 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2705 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2706 once it is created.
2707
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002708- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2709 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2710 (key, value) pairs.
2711
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002712- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002713 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2714 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2715
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002716- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2717 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2718 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2719 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2720 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002721
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002722- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002723 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2724 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2725
2726 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2727
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002728- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002729 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2730
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002731Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002732-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002733
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002734- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002735 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2736 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002737
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002738- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2739 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2740 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2741 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2742 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2743 in this area anymore).
2744
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002745- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2746 threading.Timer.
2747
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002748- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2749 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2750
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002751- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002752 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2753
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002754- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002755 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2756 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2757 converted to Python longs.
2758
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002759- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002760 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2761
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002762- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2763 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2764 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2765
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002766Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002767-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002768
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002769- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2770 division operators as per PEP 238.
2771
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002772Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002773-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002774
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002775- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2776 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2777 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2778 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2779
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002780C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002782
2783- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002784
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002785- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2786 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002787 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2790 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002791 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002792 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002793
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002794- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002795 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2796 module:
2797
2798 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002799
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002800 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2801 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002802
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002803 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2804 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002805
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002806 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2807
2808 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2809
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002810- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002811 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2812 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2813 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002814
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002815New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002817
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002818- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2819 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2820 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2821 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2822 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002823
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002824Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002825-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002826
2827Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002828-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002829
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002830- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2831 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2832 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2833 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002834 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2835 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2836 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2837 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2838 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002839
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002840- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002841 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2842
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002843
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002844What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2845===========================
2846
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002847*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2848
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002849Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002850-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002851
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002852- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2853 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2854
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002855- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2856 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2857 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002858
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002859- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2860 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2861 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2862 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002863
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002864- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2865
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002867
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002868Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002869-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002870
2871- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002872 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002873 the module docstring for details.
2874
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002875Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002876-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002877
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002878- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002879 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2880 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2881 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002882
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002883- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2884 Nick Mathewson.
2885
2886Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002888
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002889- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2890 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2891 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2892 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2893 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2894 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2895 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2896 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2897
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002898- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2899 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2900 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2901 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2902
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002903- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2904 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2905 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2906 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2907 come a long way).
2908
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002909- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2910 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2911 write filters for these warnings).
2912
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002913- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2914 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2915 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2916 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2917 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2918
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002919- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2920 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2921 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2922 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2923 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2924 older distribution.
2925
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002926Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002927-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002928
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002929- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2930 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002931 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002932
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002933- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2934 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2935 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2936
2937- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2938
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002939- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2940
2941- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2942
2943- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2944
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002946
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002947- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2948
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002949New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002950-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002951
2952C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002953-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002954
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002955- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2956 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2957 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2958 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2959 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2960 against buffer overruns.
2961
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002962- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002963 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2964 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002965 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2966 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2967 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2968
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002969- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2970 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2971 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2972 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2973 deprecated.
2974
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002975Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002977
2978- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2979 relevant is found.
2980
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002981
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002982What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002983===========================
2984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2986
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002987Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002989
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002990- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2991 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2992 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2993 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2994 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2995 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2996 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2997 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002998 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002999 repaired.
3000
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003001- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003002 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003003 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3004 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3005 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3006 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3007 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3008 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3009 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3010 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3011
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003012- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3013 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3014 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3015 leading BMO character).
3016
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003017- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3018 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3019 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3020
3021 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3022 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3023 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003024
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003025 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3026 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3027 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3028 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3029 for various simple to use conversions.
3030
3031 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3032 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3033
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003034 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3035 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3036 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3037 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3038 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3039 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3040 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3041 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3042 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3043 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3044 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3045 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3046 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3047 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3048 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003049
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003050- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3051 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3052 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003053 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003054 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003055
3056 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003057 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3058 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3059 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3060 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3061 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003062 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3063 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003064
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003065 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3066 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3067 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003068 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003069
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003070- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3071 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3072 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3073 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3074 floating arithmetic,
3075
3076 x = 9007199254740992.0
3077 print long(x)
3078
3079 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3080 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3081 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3082 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3083 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3084 functions are of good quality).
3085
3086 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3087 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3088 algorithms to break.
3089
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003090- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3091 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3092 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3093 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3094 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3095 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3096 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3097 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3098 order.
3099
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003100- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3101 operation along the most common code paths.
3102
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003103- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3104 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3105
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003106- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3107 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3108 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3109 {}.update(UserDict())
3110
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003111- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3112 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3113 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3114 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3115 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3116 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3117 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3118 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3119
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003120- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003121 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003122
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003123 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003124 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3125 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003126 join() method of strings
3127 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003128 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3129 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003130 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003131 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003132
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003133- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3134 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3135
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003136- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3137 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3138
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003139- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3140 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3141 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3142 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3143
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003144- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3145 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003146 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003147 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3148 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003149
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003150- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3151
3152
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003153Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003155
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003156- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003157 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003158 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3159 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3160
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003161- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3162 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3163
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003164- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3165 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3166 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3167 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3168
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003169- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3170 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3171 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3172
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003173- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3174
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003175- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3176
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003177- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3178 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3179 that are still imported into string.py).
3180
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003181- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3182
3183- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3184 Now it does.
3185
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003186- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3187
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003188- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3189 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3190 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3191 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3192 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003193 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3194 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003195
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003196- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3197 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3198 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3199 'help(object)'.
3200
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003201Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003203
3204- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003205 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003206 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3207 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3208
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003209- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003210 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3211 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003212
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003213C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003214-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003215
3216- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3217 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218
3219----
3220
3221**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**