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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000015- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
16 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
17 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
18
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000019- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
20 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
21 cases.
22
23- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
24 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
25 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
26 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
27 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
28 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
29 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
30 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
31 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
32 a release build.
33
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000034- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
35 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
36
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000037- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000038 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000039
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000040- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
41 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
42 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
43 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
44 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
45 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
46 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
47 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
48 destroyed.
49
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000050- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
51 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
52 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
53 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
54 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
55 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
56 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
57 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
58
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000059- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
60 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
61 character other than a space.
62
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000063- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
64 by the function object or by the method object, the function
65 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
66 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
67 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
68 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
69 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
70 attributes with the same name.
71
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000072- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
73 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
74 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
75 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
76 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
77 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
78 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
79 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
80 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
81 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
82 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
83 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
84 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
85 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000086
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000087- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
88 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
89 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
90 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
91 This has been repaired.
92
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000093- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
94
95- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
96
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000097- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
98 over a sequence.
99
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000100- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
101 from any iterable.
102
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000103- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
104
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000105- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
106 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
107 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
108 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
109 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
110 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
111 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
112 records with equal keys is unchanged).
113
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000114- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
115 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
116 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
117
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000118- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
119 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
120 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
121 freelist.
122
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000123- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
124 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
125
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000126- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
127 number.
128
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000129- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
130 a TypeError exception.
131
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000132- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
133 820195.
134
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000135- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
136 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
137 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
138
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000139- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
140 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
141 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000142
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000143- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
144 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
145 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
146
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000147Extension modules
148-----------------
149
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000150- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
151 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
152
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000153- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
154 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
155 and pops on either side of the deque.
156
157- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
158 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
159
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000160- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
161 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
162 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
163 other functions that expect a function argument.
164
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000165- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
166
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000167- os.getsid was added.
168
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000169- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
170 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
171 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
172
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000173- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
174
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000175- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
176
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000177- readline.clear_history was added.
178
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000179- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
180
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000181- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
182
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000183- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
184
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000185- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
186
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000187- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
188
189- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
190
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000191- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
192
193- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
194
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000195- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
196 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
197 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
198
199- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
200 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
201 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
202 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
203 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
204 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
205 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
206
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000207- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
208 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
209 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
210 the Unix uniq filter.
211
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000212- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
213 iterators from a single iterable.
214
215- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
216 of raising a TypeError exception.
217
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000218Library
219-------
220
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000221- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
222 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
223 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
224 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
225 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
226 accordingly.
227
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000228- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
229 decoding standards.
230
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000231- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
232 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
233 called for all requests.
234
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000235- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
236 they are passed to the compiler.
237
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000238- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
239 indent, width and depth.
240
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000241- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
242 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
243
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000244- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
245 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
246
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000247- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
248
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000249- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
250
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000251- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
252
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000253- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
254 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
255
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000256- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
257 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000258
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000259- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
260 a string).
261
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000262- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
263
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000264- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
265
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000266- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
267
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000268- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
269
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000270- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
271 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
272 list of fieldnames.
273
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000274- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
275 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
276
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000277- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
278
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000279- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
280 empty lists.
281
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000282- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
283 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
284 and shelves.
285
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000286- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
287 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
288
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000289- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000290 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
291 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000292
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000293- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
294 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000295 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000296
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000297- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000298 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
299 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
300
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000301- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
302 and removed in Py2.4.
303
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000304- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
305
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000306- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
307
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000308Tools/Demos
309-----------
310
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000311- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
312 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
313
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000314- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
315
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000316- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
317 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
318 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
319 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
320
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000321- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
322
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000323- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
324 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
325 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
326 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
327 now.
328
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000329- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
330 in effect
331
332- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
333 C-c C-h
334
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000335- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
336 -d option was given.
337
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000338Build
339-----
340
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000341- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
342 removed.
343
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000344- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
345 supported (see PEP 11).
346
347- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
348
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000349- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
350
351- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
352 (see PEP 11).
353
354- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
355 sizeof(char) must be 1.
356
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000357C API
358-----
359
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000360- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
361 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
362 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
363 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
364 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
365
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000366- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
367 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
368 about 10% faster.
369
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000370- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
371 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
372
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000373- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
374 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
375 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
376 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
377
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000378New platforms
379-------------
380
381Tests
382-----
383
384Windows
385-------
386
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000387- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
388 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
389 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
390 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
391
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000392- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
393 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
394 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
395
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000396Mac
397----
398
399
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000400What's New in Python 2.3 final?
401===============================
402
403*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
404
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000405IDLE
406----
407
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000408- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
409 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
410 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
411 context-menu actions.
412
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000413- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
414 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
415 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
416 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
417 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
418 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
419 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
420 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
421 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
422
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000423
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000424What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
425=============================================
426
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000427*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000428
429Core and builtins
430-----------------
431
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000432- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000433 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000434 comment at the end are still unsupported.
435
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000436Extension modules
437-----------------
438
439- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
440 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
441 than once. This has been fixed.
442
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000443- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
444 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
445 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
446 call.
447
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000448- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
449
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000450Library
451-------
452
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000453- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
454 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
455
456- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
457 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
458 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
459 restored.
460
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000461IDLE
462----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000463
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000464- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000465
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000466Build
467-----
468
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000469- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
470 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
471
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000472C API
473-----
474
475Windows
476-------
477
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000478- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
479 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
480
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000481- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
482
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000483Mac
484---
485
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000486- Various fixes to pimp.
487
488- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
489
490- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
491 more problems than it solves.
492
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000493
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000494What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
495=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000496
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000497*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
498
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000499Core and builtins
500-----------------
501
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000502- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
503 by sys.setcheckinterval().
504
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000505- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
506 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000507 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000508
509- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
510 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
511 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000512 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000513
514- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
515 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000516
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000517- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
518 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
519 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
520
521- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000522 770247.
523
524- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000525
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000526Extension modules
527-----------------
528
529- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
530 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
531
532- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
533
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000534- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
535
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000536- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
537 contained within the _strptime module.
538
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000539- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
540 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
541
542- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000543 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
544
545- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
546 the find_class attribute, if present.
547
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000548- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000549
550 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
551 (SF bug 763298).
552
553 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000554 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
555 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
556 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000557
558 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
559
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000560Library
561-------
562
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000563- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
564
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000565- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
566 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
567 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
568 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
569 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
570 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
571 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
572 or Tester().
573
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000574- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
575 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
576 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
577 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
578 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
579 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
580 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
581 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
582 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000583
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000584 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000585
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000586- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
587 weren't before was an oversight.
588
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000589- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
590 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
591
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000592- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
593 when there are no lines.
594
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000595- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
596 which could occur with Tk 8.4
597
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000598- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
599 to child processes.
600
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000601- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
602
603- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
604
605- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
606 xmlrpclib.
607
608- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
609 responses.
610
611- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
612 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
613
614- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
615 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
616 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
617
618- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
619 used as patterns.
620
621- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
622 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
623 than Tk 8.3.
624
625- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
626
627- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000628
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000629Tools/Demos
630-----------
631
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000632- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
633
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000634- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
635
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000636- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000637
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000638Build
639-----
640
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000641- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
642
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000643- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
644
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000645- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
646 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000647
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000648- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
649 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
650 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000651
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000652C API
653-----
654
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000655- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
656 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
657
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000658Windows
659-------
660
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000661- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
662 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
663 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
664 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
665 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
666 Python exception ::
667
668 thread.error: can't start new thread
669
670 is raised now.
671
672- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
673 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
674 instead of from DLL teardown.
675
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000676Mac
677---
678
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000679- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000680 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000681 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
682 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
683 the executable in the bundle.
684
685- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000686
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000687- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
688
689- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
690 on Panther.
691
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000692What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
693================================
694
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000695*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000696
697Core and builtins
698-----------------
699
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000700- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
701 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
702 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
703 with the -i option.
704
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000705- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
706 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
707
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000708- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
709 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
710
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000711- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
712 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
713 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
714 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
715 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
716 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
717 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
718 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
719 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
720 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
721 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
722 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
723 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000724
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000725- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
726 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
727 embedded in a lambda expression.
728
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000729- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
730 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
731 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
732 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
733 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
734
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000735- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
736 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
737 matches the restriction on classic classes.
738
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000739- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
740 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
741
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000742- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
743 It's writable again.
744
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000745- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
746 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
747 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000748 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000749
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000750- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
751 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
752 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
753
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000754Extension modules
755-----------------
756
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000757- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
758 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
759
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000760- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
761 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
762 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
763 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
764
765- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
766 collection.
767
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000768- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
769 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
770 unique within a single program run.
771
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000772- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
773 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
774
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000775- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
776 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
777
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000778- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
779 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000780
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000781- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
782
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000783- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
784 Fixes SF bug #730685.
785
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000786- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
787 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
788 for many BSD-derived systems.
789
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000790
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000791Library
792-------
793
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000794- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
795 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
796 primary ones:
797
798 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
799 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
800 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
801
802 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
803 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
804 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
805 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
806 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
807 framework features (which doctest lacks).
808
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000809- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
810 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
811 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
812 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
813 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
814 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
815 argument.
816
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000817- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
818 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
819 in the archive.
820
821- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
822 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
823
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000824- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
825 569574).
826
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000827- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
828 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
829 no more.
830
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000831- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
832 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
833 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
834 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
835 code coverage.
836
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000837- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
838 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
839 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000840 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
841 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000842
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000843- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
844 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
845 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000846 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000847
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000848- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
849
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000850- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
851 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
852 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
853 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
854
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000855- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
856 handling.
857
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000858- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
859 __doc__ of data descriptors.
860
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000861- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
862 in socket.py.
863
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000864- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
865
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000866- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
867 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
868 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
869 opener with proxy support.
870
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000871- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
872
873- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
874
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000875Tools/Demos
876-----------
877
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000878- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
879
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000880- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
881
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000882- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
883 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000884
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000885- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
886 files.
887
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000888Build
889-----
890
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000891- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000892 different root directory.
893
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000894C API
895-----
896
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000897- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
898 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
899 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
900 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
901 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
902 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
903 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
904 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
905 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
906 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
907
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000908- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
909 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
910 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
911 from Python.
912
913
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000914New platforms
915-------------
916
917None this time.
918
919Tests
920-----
921
922- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
923 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
924
925Windows
926-------
927
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000928- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
929
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000930- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
931 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
932 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
933 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
934 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
935 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
936 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
937 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
938 that's what it's for.
939
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000940Mac
941---
942
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000943- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
944 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
945 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
946 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000947- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
948 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
949- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000950
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000951SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
952------------------------------------
953
954430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
955598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
956622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
957661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
958683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
959697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
960713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
961724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
962727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
963729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
964730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
965731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
966732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
967733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
968735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
969740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
970744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
971745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
972747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
973749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
974751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
975753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
976755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
977757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
978760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
979
980
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000981What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
982================================
983
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000984*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000985
986Core and builtins
987-----------------
988
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000989- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
990 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
991
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000992- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
993 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
994 and cannot be strings).
995
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000996- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
997 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
998 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
999 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1000
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001001- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1002 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1003 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1004 Python itself.
1005
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001006- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1007 the referenced object, if it has one.
1008
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001009- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1010 the thread started at
1011 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1012
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001013- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1014 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1015 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1016 placed on a list index.
1017
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001018- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1019 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1020 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1021 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1022
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001023- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1024 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1025 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1026 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1027 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1028 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1029 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1030
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001031- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1032 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1033 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1034 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1035 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1036
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001037- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1038 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001039
1040- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1041 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1042 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1043 #693195.)
1044
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001045- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1046 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001047
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001048- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001049 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001050 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1051 interpreter executions, would fail.
1052
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001053- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001054 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001055 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001056
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001057Extension modules
1058-----------------
1059
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001060- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1061 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1062 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1063 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1064
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001065- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1066 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1067
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001068- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1069 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1070 and Greg Chapman.)
1071
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001072- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1073 recursively.
1074
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001075- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001076 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1077 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1078 leaks.
1079
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001080- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1081
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001082- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1083 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1084 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1085 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1086 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1087 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1088 #705836.
1089
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001090- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001091 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1092
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001093- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1094 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1095 See SF bug #692416.
1096
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001097- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1098 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1099
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001100- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1101 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1102 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001103
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001104- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001105 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1106 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1107
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001108- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1109 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1110 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1111 timeouts to work properly.
1112
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001113Library
1114-------
1115
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001116- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1117 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1118 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1119 future release.
1120
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001121- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1122 for querying platform dependent features.
1123
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001124- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001125
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001126- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1127 pickle protocol versions.
1128
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001129- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1130 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1131 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1132
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001133- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1134
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001135- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1136 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1137 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1138 modules.
1139
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001140- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1141 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1142 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1143
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001144- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1145 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1146
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001147- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1148 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1149 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1150
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001151- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001152 MS Office extensions.
1153
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001154- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1155 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1156
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001157- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1158 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1159
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001160- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1161 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1162 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1163 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1164 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1165 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1166
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001167- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1168 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1169 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001170
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001171- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1172 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1173 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1174
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001175- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1176
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001177- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1178 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1179 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1180
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001181Tools/Demos
1182-----------
1183
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001184- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1185 See the module docstring for details.
1186
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001187Build
1188-----
1189
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001190- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1191 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001192
1193C API
1194-----
1195
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001196- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1197
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001198- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1199 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1200 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1201
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001202- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1203 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001204
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001205 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1206 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1207 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001208
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001209- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001210 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1211
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001212- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1213 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1214 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001215
1216New platforms
1217-------------
1218
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001219None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001220
1221Tests
1222-----
1223
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001224- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1225 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001226
1227Windows
1228-------
1229
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001230- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1231 function.
1232
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001233- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1234 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001235
1236Mac
1237---
1238
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001239- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1240 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001241
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001242- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1243 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001244
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001245- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1246 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1247 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001248
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001249- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001250 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1251 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001252
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001253- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1254 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001255
1256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001257What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1258=================================
1259
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001260*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001261
1262Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001263-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001264
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001265- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1266 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1267 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1268
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001269- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1270 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1271 (SF patch #664376.)
1272
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001273- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1274 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1275 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1276 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1277 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1278 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001279 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001280
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001281- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1282 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1283 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1284 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001285 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001286
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001287- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1288 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1289 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1290 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1291 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1292 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1293 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1294 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1295 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1296 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1297 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1298
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001299- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1300 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1301 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1302 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1303 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1304 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1305
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001306- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1307 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1308
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001309- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1310 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1311 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1312 case.)
1313
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001314- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1315 passed as unicode strings.
1316
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001317- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1318 See SF bug #683467.
1319
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001320- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1321 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1322
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001323- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1324
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001325- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1326
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001327- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1328 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1329 arguments.
1330
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001331- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1332 See SF bug #667147.
1333
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001334- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001335 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001336 See SF bug #676155.
1337
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001338- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001339 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001340 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1341 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1342 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1343 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1344 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1345 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001346
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001347Extension modules
1348-----------------
1349
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001350- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1351 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1352 tp_as_number pointer.
1353
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001354- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1355 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1356 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1357 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1358 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1359
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001360- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1361
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001362- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1363
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001364- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001365 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001366 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1367 patch #678531.)
1368
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001369- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1370 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1371
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001372- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1373 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1374
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001375- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1376
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001377- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1378 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1379 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1380
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001381- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1382
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001383- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1384 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1385
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001386- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001387
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001388- datetime changes:
1389
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001390 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1391
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001392 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1393 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1394 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1395 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1396 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1397 now.
1398
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001399 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001400 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1401 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001402
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001403 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001404 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001405 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1406 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1407 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1408 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001409
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001410 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1411 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1412 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001413 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1414
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001415 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1416 by a later example coded by Guido.
1417
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001418 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001419 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1420 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1421 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001422 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1423 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1424
1425 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1426 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1427 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1428 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1429 tzinfo subclass instance.
1430
1431 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1432 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1433 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1434 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1435 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1436 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1437 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1438 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001439
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001440 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1441 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1442 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1443 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1444 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001445 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1446
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001447 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001448
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001449 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1450 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1451 as a naive datetime object.
1452
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001453 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1454 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1455 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1456
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001457 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1458 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1459 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1460 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1461 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1462 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1463 comparison.
1464
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001465 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1466 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1467 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1468 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001469 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001470
1471 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001472
1473 and ::
1474
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001475 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1476
1477 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1478 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1479 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1480 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1481
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001482 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1483 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1484 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1485 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1486 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1487
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001488 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1489 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001490 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1491 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001492
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001493Library
1494-------
1495
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001496- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1497 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1498
1499- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1500 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1501 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1502 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1503 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1504 See PEP 307 for details.
1505
1506- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1507 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1508
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001509- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1510 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001511 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001512 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1513 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001514 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001515
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001516- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1517 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1518
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001519- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1520 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1521 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1522
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001523- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1524
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001525- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1526 exception.
1527
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001528- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1529 class.
1530
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001531- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1532 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1533 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1534
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001535- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1536 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1537
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001538- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001539 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1540 See SF bug #659228.
1541
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001542- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1543 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1544 See SF patch #651082.
1545
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001546- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001547
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001548- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1549 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1550
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001551- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001552 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001553
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001554- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1555 DOS paths from other platforms.
1556
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001557Tools/Demos
1558-----------
1559
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001560- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1561 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1562 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1563 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1564 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1565 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1566 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1567 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1568 example:
1569
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001570 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1571 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001572
1573 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1574
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001575
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001576Build
1577-----
1578
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001579- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1580 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1581 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001582 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1583
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001584 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1585
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001586- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1587 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1588 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1589 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1590 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1591 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1592 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1593 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1594 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1595
1596- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1597 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1598 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1599 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1600
1601- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1602 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1603
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001604C API
1605-----
1606
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001607- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1608 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001609
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001610- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1611 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1612 tp_as_number pointer.
1613
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001614- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1615 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1616 (SF #681367)
1617
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001618- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1619 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1620 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1621 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001622
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001623Tests
1624-----
1625
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001626- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001627 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1628 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1629 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1630 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1631 pydoc.)
1632
1633- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1634
1635- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001636
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001637Windows
1638-------
1639
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001640- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1641 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1642 time).
1643
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001644- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1645 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1646
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001647- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1648 release without strong cryptography.
1649
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001650- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001651 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001652
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001653- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1654 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1655
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001656Mac
1657---
1658
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001659- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1660 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001661
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001662- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1663 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1664 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001665
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001666- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1667 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001668
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001669- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1670 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1671 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1672 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001673
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001674- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001675 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1676 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1677 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001678
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001679
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001680What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001681=================================
1682
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001683*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001684
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001685Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001686--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001687
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001688- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1689
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001690- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1691 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001692 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001693 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001694 a different meaning than before.
1695
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001696- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001697 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001698 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001699
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001700- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001701 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001702 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001703
1704- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1705 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1706 and deallocation.
1707
1708- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1709 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1710
1711- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1712 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1713 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1714 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1715 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1716
1717- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1718 now detected by the garbage collector.
1719
1720- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1721 [SF bug 519621]
1722
1723- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1724 identifier.
1725
1726- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1727 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1728 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1729 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1730 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1731 [SF bug 563060]
1732
1733- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1734 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1735 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1736 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1737 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1738
1739- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1740 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1741 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1742
1743- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1744
1745- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1746 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1747 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1748 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1749 state of the slots would be lost.)
1750
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001751Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001752-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001753
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001754- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001755 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1756 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1757 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1758 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001759 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1760 Jython 2.1.
1761
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001762- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001763 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001764 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1765 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1766 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1767 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1768 these, see PEP 302.
1769
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001770- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1771 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1772 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1773
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001774- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1775 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1776 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1777
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001778- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1779 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1780 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1781
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001782- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1783 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1784 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1785 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1786 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1787 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1788 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1789 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1790 releases or implementations.
1791
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001792- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001793 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1794 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001795
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001796- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1797 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1798
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001799- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1800 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1801 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1802
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001803- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1804 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1805
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001806- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1807 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001808 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1809 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001810
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001811- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1812 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1813 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1814 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1815 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1816
1817 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1818 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1819 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1820 pattern.
1821
1822 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1823 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1824 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1825 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1826
1827 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1828 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1829 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1830 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1831 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1832 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1833
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001834- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1835 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1836 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1837 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1838 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1839 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1840 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1841 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001842
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001843- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1844 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1845 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1846 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1847 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001848 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1849 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1850 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1851 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1852 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1853 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1854 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001855
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001856- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1857 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1858
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001859- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1860 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1861 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1862 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1863 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1864 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1865 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1866 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1867 to Zack Weinberg!
1868
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001869- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1870 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1871 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1872 type. This has been fixed now.
1873
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001874- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1875 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1876 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1877
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001878- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1879 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1880 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1881 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1882 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1883 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1884 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1885 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001886 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001887
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001888- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1889 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1890 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001891
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001892- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1893 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1894 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1895 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1896 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1897 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1898 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1899 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001900 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001901 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1902 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1903
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001904- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1905 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1906 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1907 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1908 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1909 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1910 this.)
1911
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001912- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1913 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001914 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001915 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001916 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1917 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001918 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1919 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001920
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001921- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1922 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1923 currently running.
1924
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001925- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1926 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1927 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1928 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1929
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001930- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1931 as directory names.
1932
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001933- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1934 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1935
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001936- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1937 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1938
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001939- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001940 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1941 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001942
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001943- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1944 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1945 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1946 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1947 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1948
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001949- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1950 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1951 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1952 removed.
1953
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001954- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1955 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1956 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1957
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001958- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1959 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1960 to __debug__.
1961
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001962- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1963 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1964 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1965
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001966- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1967 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1968 deprecated now.
1969
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001970- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1971 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1972 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001973
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001974- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1975 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1976 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1977 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1978 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001979
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001980- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1981 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1982
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001983- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1984 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1985 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001986 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001987 is backward compatible.
1988
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001989- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1990 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1991 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1992 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1993 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1994
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001995- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1996 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1997 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1998 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1999 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2000 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002001
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002002- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2003 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2004
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002005- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2006 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2007
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002008- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2009 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2010 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2011 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2012 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2013
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002014- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2015 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2016 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2017
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002018- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002019 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2020
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002021- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2022 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2023 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002024
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002025- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2026 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2027
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002028- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2029 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2030 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2031
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002032- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2033
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002034Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002035-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002036
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002037- Added three operators to the operator module:
2038 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2039 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2040 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2041
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002042- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2043
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002044- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2045 archives.
2046
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002047- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2048 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2049 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2050
2051 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2052
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002053- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2054 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2055 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002056 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002057
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002058- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2059 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2060 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2061 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002062 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2063 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2064 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2065 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002066
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002067- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2068 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002069
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002070- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2071
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002072- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2073 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2074
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002075- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2076 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2077 supported.
2078
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002079- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2080
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002081- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2082 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002083
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002084- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2085 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2086
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002087- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2088
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002089- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2090 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2091
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002092- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2093 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2094 functions but callable type objects.
2095
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002096- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002097 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002098 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002099
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002100- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2101 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002102
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002103- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2104 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002105
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002106- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2107 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2108 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2109 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2110
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002111- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2112 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002113
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002114- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2115 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2116 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2117 and __imul__.
2118
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002119- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002120 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2121 is called.
2122
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002123- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2124 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2125 interpreter was compiled.
2126
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002127- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2128 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2129 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002130 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002131 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2132 1, not 2.
2133
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002134- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2135 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2136 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2137 limit.
2138
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002139- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2140 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2141 bug #623464.
2142
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002143- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2144 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2145 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2146 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2147
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002148Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002149-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002150
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002151- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2152
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002153- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2154 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2155 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2156 with Python 2.3a2.
2157
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002158- os.path exposes getctime.
2159
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002160- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002161 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002162 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002163 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002164 unit tests of floating point results.
2165
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002166- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2167 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2168 has been increased.
2169
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002170- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2171 executed.
2172
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002173- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2174 postinstallation script.
2175
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002176- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2177 test the current module.
2178
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002179- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002180 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2181 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2182 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2183 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2184
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002185- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002186 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002187 Ward's Optik package.
2188
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002189- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2190 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2191 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2192 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2193
2194- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2195 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002196 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002197
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002198- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2199 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2200 shelf are binary pickles.
2201
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002202- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2203 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2204
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002205- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2206 modules are iterators now.
2207
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002208- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2209 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2210 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2211 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2212 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2213 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002214
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002215- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2216 with their entity value.
2217
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002218- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2219
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002220- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2221 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002222
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002223- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2224 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002225 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002226
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002227- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2228 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2229 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2230 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2231 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2232 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2233 main():
2234
2235 import locale
2236 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2237
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002238- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2239 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2240
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002241- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2242 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2243 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2244 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2245 to the new standard.
2246
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002247- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2248 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2249 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2250 an extension to the database.
2251
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002252- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2253 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2254 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2255 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002256 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002257
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002258- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002259 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002260
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002261- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2262 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2263 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2264 bounded integers.
2265
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002266- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2267 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2268 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2269 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2270 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2271 in existence.
2272
2273 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2274 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2275 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2276 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2277 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2278 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2279
2280 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2281 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2282 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2283 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2284
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002285- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2286 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2287 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2288
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002289- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2290
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002291- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2292 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2293 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2294 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2295
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002296- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2297 argument.
2298
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002299- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2300 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2301 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2302 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2303 [SF patch 560794].
2304
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002305- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2306 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2307 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002308 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2309 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2310 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002311
2312- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2313 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002314
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002315- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2316 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2317 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2318 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002319
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002320- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2321 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2322 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2323 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2324 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2325
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002326- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002327
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002328- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2329
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002330- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2331 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2332 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2333 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2334 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2335 identical to None.
2336
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002337- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2338 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2339 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2340 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2341 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2342 results now.
2343
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002344- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2345 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2346
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002347- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2348 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2349 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2350 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2351 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2352 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2353 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2354 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2355
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002356- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2357
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002358- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2359 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2360
2361- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2362 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2363 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2364 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2365 and other systems.
2366
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002367- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2368 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2369 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2370 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 +00002371 work well with these.
2372
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002373- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2374
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002375- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002376 connections.
2377
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002378- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2379 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2380 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2381
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002382- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2383 sets
2384
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002385- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2386 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2387 name.
2388
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002389- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2390 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2391 passed in.
2392
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002393- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002394 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002395 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2396 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002397
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002398- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2399
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002400- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2401
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002402- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2403 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2404 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2405
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002406- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2407 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2408 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2409 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002410 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002411
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002412- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002413 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002414 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002415
2416- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2417 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2418 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2419
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002420- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002421 the value of its expression argument.
2422
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002423- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2424 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2425 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2426
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002427- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2428 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2429 skipstone browser was included.
2430
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002431- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2432 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2433
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002434Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002435-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002436
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002437- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2438 names in addition to accepting file names.
2439
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002440- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2441 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2442 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2443 still used and useful.)
2444
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002445- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2446 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2447 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2448 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002449
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002450- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2451 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2452 the generated binary.
2453
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002454Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002455-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002456
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002457- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2458
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002459- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2460 except in the hands of experts.
2461
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002462- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002463 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2464 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2465 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002466
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002467- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2468 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2469 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2470 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2471 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2472 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2473 builds.
2474
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002475- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2476 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2477 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2478 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2479 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2480 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2481 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2482 new type.
2483
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002484- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002485
2486 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2487 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2488 positive infinities.
2489
2490 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2491 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2492 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2493 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2494 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2495 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2496 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2497
2498 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2499
2500 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2501
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002502- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2503 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2504 size of the executable.
2505
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002506- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2507 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2508 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2509 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002510
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002511- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2512
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002513- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2514 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2515 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002516
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002517- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2518 well as Unix.
2519
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002520- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2521 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2522 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2523 modules in the README file for details.
2524
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002525C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002526-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002527
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002528- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2529 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002530 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002531 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002532 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002533
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002534- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2535 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2536 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2537 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2538 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2539 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002540 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002541 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2542 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2543 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2544 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2545 aligned.)
2546
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002547- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2548 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2549 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2550
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002551- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2552 level.
2553
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002554- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2555 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2556 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2557 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2558 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2559
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002560- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2561 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2562 code.
2563
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002564- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2565 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2566 adjusting for negative indices.
2567
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002568- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2569 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2570 object.
2571
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002572- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2573 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2574 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2575
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002576- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2577 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002578
2579- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2580
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002581- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2582 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2583 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2584 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2585
2586- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2587
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002588- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002589
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002590- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002591 without going through the buffer API.
2592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002593- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002594
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002595- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2596 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2597 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2598 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2599
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002600- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2601 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2602
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002603- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002604 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2605
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002606New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002607-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002608
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002609- OpenVMS is now supported.
2610
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002611- AtheOS is now supported.
2612
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002613- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2614
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002615- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2616
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002617Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618-----
2619
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002620- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2621 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2622 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002623
2624Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002625-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002626
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002627- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2628 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2629 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2630 bugs.
2631 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002632 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002633 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2634 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002635 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002636
2637- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002638 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002639
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002640- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2641 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2642
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002643- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2644 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002645 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002646 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2647
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002648- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2649 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2650 use files" uninstall option).
2651
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002652- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2653
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002654- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2655 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2656
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002657- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2658 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2659 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2660
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002661- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2662 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2663 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2664 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2665 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002666 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2667 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2668 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002669
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002670- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002671 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002672 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2673 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2674 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2675 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2676 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2677 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2678 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2679 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2680 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2681 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2682 work around.
2683
2684- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2685 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2686 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2687 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2688 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2689 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2690 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2691 specified with O_CREAT too).
2692
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002693Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002694----
2695
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002696- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002697
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002698- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2699 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2700 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2701
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002702- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2703 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2704 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2705
2706- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2707 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2708 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2709 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2710 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2711 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2712 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2713 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002714
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002715- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2716 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2717 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002718
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002719- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2720 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2721 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2722 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2723 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002724
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002725- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2726 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2727 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002728
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002729- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2730 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002731
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002732- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2733 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2734 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2735 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2736 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002737
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002738- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2739 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2740 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2741
2742- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2743 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2744 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002745
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002746- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2747 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2748 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2749 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002750 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002751
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002752- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2753 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002754
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002755- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2756 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002757
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002758- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002759 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002760 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2761 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002762
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002763
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002764What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002765===============================
2766
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002767*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2768
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002769Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002770--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002771
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002772- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2773 with a custom metaclass.
2774
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002775Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002777
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002778- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2779 are proxies.
2780
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002781Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002782-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002783
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002784- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2785 very short strings.
2786
2787- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2788 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2789 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2790 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2791 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2792
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002793Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002795
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002796- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2797 close or delete time).
2798
2799- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2800 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2801
2802- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2803
2804- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002805 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002806
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002807Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002808-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002809
2810Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002812
2813C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002814-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002815
2816New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002817-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002818
2819Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002820-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002821
2822Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002823-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002824
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002825- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2826
2827- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2828 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2829
2830- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2831 deleted at process exit time.
2832
2833- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2834 in backslash.
2835
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002836Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002837----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002838
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002839- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2840 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2841 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2842
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002843
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002844What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002845===========================
2846
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002847*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2848
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002849Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002850--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002851
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002852- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2853 been extensively updated. See
2854
2855 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2856
2857 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2858
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002859- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2860 deleted!
2861
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002862- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2863 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2864 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2865 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2866 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2867
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002868- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2869
2870 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2871 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2872
2873 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2874 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2875 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2876 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2877 supported anyway.
2878
2879 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2880 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2881
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002882- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2883 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2884 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2885 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2886 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002887
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002888- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2889 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2890 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2891
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002892Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002893-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002894
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002895- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2896 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2897 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2898 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2899 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2900 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002901 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2902 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2903 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2904 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002905
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002906- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2907 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2908 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2909
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002910Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002912
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002913- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2914
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002915Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002916-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002917
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002918- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2919 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2920 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2921 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2922 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2923 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2924
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002925- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2926
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002927- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2928
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002929- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2930
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002931- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2932 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2933 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2934
2935- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2936
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002937Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002938-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002939
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002940- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2941 off a search on Google.
2942
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002943Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002944-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002945
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002946- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2947 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2948 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2949 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2950 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2951 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2952 other platforms should do likewise.
2953
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002954- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2955 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2956 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2957
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002958C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002959-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002960
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002961- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2962 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2963 producing key-value pairs.
2964
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002965- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002966 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002967 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2968 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2969 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2970 previously went unchallenged.
2971
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002972New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002974
2975Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002977
2978Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002979-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002980
2981Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002982----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002983
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002984- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2985 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002986
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002987- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2988 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2989 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2990 home.
2991
2992
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002993What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002994===========================
2995
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2997
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002998Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002999--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003000
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003001- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3002 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003003
3004 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003005 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003006
3007 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3008 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003009 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003010 This needs to be documented.
3011
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003012- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3013 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3014
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003015- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3016 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3017 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3018
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003019- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3020 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3021
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003022- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3023 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3024 class forbids it).
3025
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003026- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3027 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3028 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3029
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003030- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3031
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003032Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003033-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003034
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003035- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3036 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003037 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003038
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003039- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3040 (like 1 + '').
3041
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003042Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003043-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003044
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003045- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3046 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3047 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3048 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003049 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003050 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3051
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003052- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3053 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3054 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3055 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3056
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003057- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3058 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003059 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3060 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3061 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003062
3063- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3064 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003065
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003066- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3067 bytes on its input.
3068
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003069Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003071
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003072- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003073 convenience function.
3074
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003075- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3076 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3077 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003078 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3079 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3080 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3081 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3082 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3083 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003084
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003085- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3086 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3087 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3088 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3089
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003090- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3091 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3092 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3093
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003094- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3095 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3096 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3097 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3098
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003099- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3100 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003101 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003102 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3103 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3104 new -l and -e options.
3105
3106- statcache is now deprecated.
3107
3108- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3109 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003110 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003111 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3112 time properly taken into account.
3113
3114- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3115 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3116 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3117 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3118
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003119Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003120-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003121
3122Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003123-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003124
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003125- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3126 is built with libdb3 if available.
3127
3128- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3129
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003130C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003132
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003133- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3134 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3135 PySequence_Size().
3136
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003137- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3138
3139- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3140 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3141 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3142
3143- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3144 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3145
3146- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3147 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3148
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003149New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003151
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003152- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3153 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3154
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003155- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3156 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3157
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003158- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3159
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003160Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003161-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003162
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003163- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3164 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3165
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003166Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003168
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003169Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003170----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003171
3172- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3173 removed completely in the next release.
3174
3175- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3176 OSX.
3177
3178- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3179 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3180
3181- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3182
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003183
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003184What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003185===========================
3186
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003187*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3188
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003189Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003191
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003192- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003193 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003194 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003195 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3196 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003197 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3198 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003199 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3200 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003201
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003202- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3203 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3204
3205- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3206 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3207
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003208Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003210
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003211- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3212 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3213 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3214 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3215 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3216 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3217 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3218 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3219
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003220- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3221 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3222 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3223 example).
3224
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003225- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003226 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003227 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003228 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003229
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003230- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3231 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3232 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003233 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003234
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003235- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3236 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3237 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3238 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3239 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3240 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3241
3242 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3243
3244 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3245
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003246Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003247-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003248
3249- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3250
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003251- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3252
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003253- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3254 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003255
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003256- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3257 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3258 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3259 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3260 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3261 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003262 attributes.
3263
3264- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3265 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3266 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003267
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003268- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3269 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3270 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003271
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003272- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3273 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3274 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003275 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3276 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3277
3278- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3279 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003280
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003281Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003283
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003284- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3285 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3286
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003287- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3288 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3289 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3290 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3291
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003292- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3293 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3294 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3295 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3296
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003297 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3298 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3299 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3300 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3301 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3302 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3303 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3304 without losing information).
3305
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003306- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003307 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3308 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3309 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3310 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3311 module).
3312
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003313 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003314 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3315 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3316 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3317 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003318
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003319- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003320 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3321 encoding.
3322
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003323- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3324 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3325
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003327 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3328
3329- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3330 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3331 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3332 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3333
3334- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3335
3336- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3337 ON, and OFF.
3338
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003339- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3340 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3341
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003342Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003344
3345- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3346 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3347 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003348
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003349- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3350 been added: -X and -E.
3351
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003352Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003353-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003354
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003355- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3356 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3357
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003358C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003360
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003361- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3362 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3363 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3364 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3365 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3366
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003367- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3368 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3369 as long) arguments.
3370
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003371- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3372 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3373 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3374 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3375 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3376 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3377
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003378- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3379 input.
3380
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003381New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003382-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003383
3384Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003385-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003386
3387Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003389
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003390- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3391 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3392 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3393
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003394- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3395 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3396 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003397 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003398
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3400 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3401 import signal
3402 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003403
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003405 while 1:
3406 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003408 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3409 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3410 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3411 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003412
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003413
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003414What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3415===========================
3416
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3418
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003419Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003420--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003421
3422- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3423 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3424 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3425
3426- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3427 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3428 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3429 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3430 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3431 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3432 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003433
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003434- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003435 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003436 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3437 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3438 associate a docstring with a property.
3439
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003440- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3441 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3442 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3443 other built-in object types.
3444
3445- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3446 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3447 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3448 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3449 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3450
3451- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3452 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3453
3454- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3455 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003456 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003457 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3458 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3459 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3460 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3461 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3462
3463- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3464 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3465 class.
3466
3467- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3468 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3469 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3470 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3471
3472- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3473 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3474 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3475 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3476
3477- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3478 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3479
3480- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3481 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3482 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3483 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3484 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003485 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003486 with the same value as s.
3487
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003488- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3489
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003490Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003492
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003493- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3494
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003495- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3496 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3497 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3498 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3499 objects.
3500
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003501- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3502 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003503 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3504 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3505
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003506- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3507 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3508 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3509
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003510Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003512
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003513- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3514 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3515 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3516 by the instances.
3517
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003518- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3519 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3520 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3521
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003522- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3523 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3524 before the entire comparison is complete.
3525
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003526- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3527 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3528 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3529
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003530- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3531 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3532 getwriter().
3533
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003534- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3535 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3536
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003537- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003538 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3539 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3540
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003541- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3542 iterable object.
3543
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003544- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3545 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003546
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003547- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3548 authentication.
3549
3550- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3551 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003552
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003553- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003554 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3555 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3556 a sample driver.)
3557
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003558Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003559-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003560
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003561- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3562 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3563 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3564 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3565 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3566 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3567 kernel has large file support.
3568
3569- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3570 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3571 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3572 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3573 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3574
3575- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3576 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3577 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3578
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003579C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003580-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003581
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003582- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3583 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3584
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003585New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003587
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003588- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3589 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3590
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003591Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003593
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003594- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3595 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3596 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3597 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3598 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3599
3600- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3601 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3602 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3603 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3604
3605- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3606 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3607
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003608Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003609-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003610
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003611- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003612 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3613 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003614
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003615
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003616What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3617===========================
3618
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3620
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003621Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003623
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003624- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3625 big to represent as a C double.
3626
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003627- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3628 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3629 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3630 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3631 restriction).
3632
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003633- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3634 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3635 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3636 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3637 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3638
3639 >>> dir([])
3640 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3641 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3642 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3643 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3644 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3645 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3646 'reverse', 'sort']
3647
3648 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3649
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003650- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003651 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3652 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3653 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3654 OverflowError exception.
3655
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003656- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003657 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003658 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3659 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3660 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3661 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3662 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003663 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3665 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3666
3667 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3668 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3669 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3670 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003671
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003672- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003673 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3674 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3675 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3676 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3677 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3678 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3679 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3680 once it is created.
3681
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003682- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3683 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3684 (key, value) pairs.
3685
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003686- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003687 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3688 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3689
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003690- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3691 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3692 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3693 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3694 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003695
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003696- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003697 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3698 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3699
3700 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3701
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003702- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003703 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3704
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003705Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003707
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003708- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003709 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3710 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003711
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003712- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3713 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3714 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3715 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3716 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3717 in this area anymore).
3718
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003719- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3720 threading.Timer.
3721
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003722- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3723 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3724
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003725- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003726 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3727
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003728- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003729 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3730 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3731 converted to Python longs.
3732
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003733- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003734 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3735
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003736- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3737 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3738 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3739
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003740Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003742
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003743- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3744 division operators as per PEP 238.
3745
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003746Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003748
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003749- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3750 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3751 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3752 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3753
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003754C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003756
3757- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003758
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003759- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3760 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003761 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003762
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3764 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003765 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003767
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003768- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003769 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3770 module:
3771
3772 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003773
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003774 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3775 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003776
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003777 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3778 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003779
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003780 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3781
3782 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3783
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003784- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003785 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3786 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3787 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003788
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003789New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003791
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003792- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3793 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3794 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3795 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3796 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003797
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003798Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003800
3801Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003803
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003804- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3805 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3806 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3807 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003808 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3809 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3810 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3811 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3812 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003813
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003814- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003815 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3816
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003817
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003818What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3819===========================
3820
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3822
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003823Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003824-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003825
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003826- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3827 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3828
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003829- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3830 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3831 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003832
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003833- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3834 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3835 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3836 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003837
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003838- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3839
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003841
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003842Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003844
3845- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003846 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003847 the module docstring for details.
3848
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003849Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003851
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003852- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003853 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3854 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3855 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003856
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003857- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3858 Nick Mathewson.
3859
3860Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003862
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003863- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3864 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3865 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3866 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3867 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3868 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3869 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3870 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3871
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003872- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3873 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3874 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3875 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3876
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003877- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3878 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3879 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3880 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3881 come a long way).
3882
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003883- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3884 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3885 write filters for these warnings).
3886
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003887- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3888 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3889 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3890 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3891 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3892
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003893- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3894 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3895 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3896 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3897 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3898 older distribution.
3899
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003900Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003901-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003902
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003903- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3904 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003905 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003906
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003907- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3908 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3909 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3910
3911- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3912
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003913- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3914
3915- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3916
3917- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3918
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003920
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003921- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3922
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003923New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003925
3926C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003928
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003929- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3930 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3931 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3932 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3933 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3934 against buffer overruns.
3935
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003936- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003937 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3938 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003939 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3940 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3941 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3942
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003943- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3944 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3945 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3946 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3947 deprecated.
3948
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003949Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003951
3952- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3953 relevant is found.
3954
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003955
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003956What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003957===========================
3958
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3960
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003961Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003962----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003963
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003964- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3965 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3966 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3967 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3968 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3969 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3970 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3971 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003972 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003973 repaired.
3974
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003975- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003976 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003977 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3978 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3979 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3980 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3981 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3982 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3983 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3984 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3985
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003986- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3987 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3988 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3989 leading BMO character).
3990
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003991- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3992 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3993 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3994
3995 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3996 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3997 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003998
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003999 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4000 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4001 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4002 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4003 for various simple to use conversions.
4004
4005 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4006 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4007
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4009 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4010 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4011 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4012 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4013 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4014 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4015 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4016 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4017 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4018 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4019 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4020 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4021 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4022 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004023
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004024- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4025 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4026 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004027 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004028 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004029
4030 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004031 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4032 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4033 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4034 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4035 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004036 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4037 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004038
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004039 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4040 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4041 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004042 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004043
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004044- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4045 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4046 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4047 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4048 floating arithmetic,
4049
4050 x = 9007199254740992.0
4051 print long(x)
4052
4053 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4054 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4055 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4056 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4057 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4058 functions are of good quality).
4059
4060 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4061 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4062 algorithms to break.
4063
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004064- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4065 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4066 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4067 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4068 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4069 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4070 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4071 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4072 order.
4073
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004074- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4075 operation along the most common code paths.
4076
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004077- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4078 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4079
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004080- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4081 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4082 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4083 {}.update(UserDict())
4084
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004085- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4086 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4087 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4088 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4089 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4090 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4091 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4092 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4093
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004094- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004095 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004097 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004098 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4099 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004100 join() method of strings
4101 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004102 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4103 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004105 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004106
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004107- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4108 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4109
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004110- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4111 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4112
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004113- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4114 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4115 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4116 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4117
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004118- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4119 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004120 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004121 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4122 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004123
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004124- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4125
4126
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004127Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004129
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004130- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004131 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004132 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4133 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4134
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004135- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4136 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4137
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004138- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4139 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4140 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4141 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4142
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004143- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4144 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4145 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4146
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004147- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4148
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004149- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4150
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004151- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4152 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4153 that are still imported into string.py).
4154
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004155- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4156
4157- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4158 Now it does.
4159
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004160- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4161
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004162- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4163 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4164 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4165 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4166 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004167 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4168 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004169
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004170- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4171 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4172 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4173 'help(object)'.
4174
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004175Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004177
4178- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004179 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004180 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4181 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4182
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004183- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004184 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4185 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004186
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004187C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004189
4190- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4191 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192
4193----
4194
4195**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**