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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
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +000015- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
16 a new .pyc magic.
17
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000018- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
19 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
20 be there.
21
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000022- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
23 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
24 the LC_NUMERIC category.
25
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000026- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
27 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
28 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
29
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000030- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
31
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000032- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
33 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
34 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000035
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000036- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
37 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
38
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000039- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
40
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000041- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
42 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
43
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000044- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
45
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000046- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
47
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000048- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
49 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
50
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000051- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
52 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
53 Fixes bug #858016 .
54
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000055- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
56 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
57 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
58
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000059- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
60 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
61 improves their performance (about 35%).
62
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000063- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
64 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
65 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
66
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000067- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
68 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
69 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
70 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
71
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000072- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
73 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
74 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
75 length is not known).
76
77- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
78 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000079 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
80 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000081 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
82
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000083- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
84 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
85
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000086- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
87 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
88 keyword arguments.
89
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000090- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
91 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
92 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
93
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000094- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
95 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
96 cases.
97
98- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
99 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
100 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
101 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
102 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
103 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
104 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
105 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
106 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
107 a release build.
108
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000109- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
110 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
111
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000112- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000113 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000114
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000115- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
116 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
117 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
118 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
119 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
120 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
121 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
122 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
123 destroyed.
124
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000125- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
126 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
127 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
128 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
129 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
130 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
131 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
132 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
133
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000134- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
135 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
136 character other than a space.
137
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000138- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
139 by the function object or by the method object, the function
140 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
141 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
142 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
143 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
144 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
145 attributes with the same name.
146
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000147- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
148 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
149 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
150 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
151 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
152 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
153 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
154 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
155 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
156 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
157 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
158 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
159 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
160 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000161
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000162- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
163 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
164 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
165 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
166 This has been repaired.
167
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000168- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
169
170- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
171
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000172- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
173 over a sequence.
174
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000175- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000176 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000177
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000178- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
179
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000180- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
181 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
182 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
183 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
184 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
185 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
186 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
187 records with equal keys is unchanged).
188
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000189- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
190 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
191 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
192
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000193- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
194 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
195 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
196 freelist.
197
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000198- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
199 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
200
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000201- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
202 number.
203
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000204- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
205 a TypeError exception.
206
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000207- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
208 820195.
209
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000210- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
211 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
212 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
213
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000214- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
215 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
216 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000217
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000218- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
219 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
220 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
221
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000222- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
223 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000224 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000225
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000226- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000227 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
228 the first call.
229
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000230
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000231Extension modules
232-----------------
233
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000234- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
235 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
236 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
237 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
238 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
239 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
240 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000241
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000242- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
243
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000244- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
245
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000246- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
247 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
248
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000249- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
250 fewer false positives.
251
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000252- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
253 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
254
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000255- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
256 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
257
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000258- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
259 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000260 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
261 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
262 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000263
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000264- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
265 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
266 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
267 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
268
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000269- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
270 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
271 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
272 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
273 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
274 #897625.
275
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000276- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
277 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
278
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000279- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
280 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
281 and pops on either side of the deque.
282
283- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
284 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
285
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000286- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
287 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
288 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
289 other functions that expect a function argument.
290
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000291- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
292
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000293- os.getsid was added.
294
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000295- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
296 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
297 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
298
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000299- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
300
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000301- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
302
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000303- readline.clear_history was added.
304
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000305- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
306
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000307- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
308
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000309- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
310
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000311- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
312
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000313- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
314
315- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
316
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000317- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
318
319- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
320
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000321- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
322 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
323 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
324
325- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
326 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
327 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
328 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
329 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
330 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
331 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
332
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000333- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
334 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
335 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
336 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000337
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000338- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
339 iterators from a single iterable.
340
341- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
342 of raising a TypeError exception.
343
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000344- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
345 as parameter.
346
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000347Library
348-------
349
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000350- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
351 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
352
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000353- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
354
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000355- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000356 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000357
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000358- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
359 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
360
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000361- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
362
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000363- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
364 on cygwin and mingw32.
365
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000366- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
367
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000368- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
369 module.
370
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000371- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
372 installation scheme for all platforms.
373
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000374- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
375 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
376 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
377
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000378- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
379 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
380 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
381
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000382- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
383
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000384- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
385
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000386- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
387 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
388
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000389- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
390 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
391 type pattern with the same value exists.
392
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000393- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
394 when run from the command prompt).
395
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000396- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
397 not taken into consideration when caching value.
398
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000399- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
400 default sort).
401
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000402- Added global runctx function to profile module
403
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000404- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
405
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000406- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
407
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000408- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
409
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000410- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
411 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
412 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
413 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
414 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
415 accordingly.
416
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000417- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
418 decoding standards.
419
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000420- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
421 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
422 called for all requests.
423
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000424- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
425 they are passed to the compiler.
426
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000427- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
428 indent, width and depth.
429
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000430- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
431 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
432
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000433- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
434 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
435
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000436- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
437
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000438- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
439
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000440- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
441
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000442- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
443 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
444
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000445- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000446 for better performance.
447
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000448- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000449
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000450- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
451 a string).
452
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000453- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
454
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000455- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
456
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000457- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
458
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000459- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
460
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000461- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
462 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
463 list of fieldnames.
464
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000465- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
466 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
467
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000468- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
469
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000470- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
471 empty lists.
472
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000473- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
474 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
475 and shelves.
476
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000477- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
478 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
479
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000480- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000481 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
482 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000483
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000484- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
485 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000486 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000487
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000488- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000489 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
490 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
491
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000492- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
493 and removed in Py2.4.
494
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000495- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
496
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000497- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
498
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000499Tools/Demos
500-----------
501
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000502- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
503 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
504
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000505- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
506
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000507- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
508 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
509 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
510 destination in situations where both files are given.
511
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000512- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
513 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
514 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
515 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
516
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000517- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
518
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000519- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
520 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
521 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
522 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
523 now.
524
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000525- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
526 in effect
527
528- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
529 C-c C-h
530
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000531- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
532 -d option was given.
533
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000534Build
535-----
536
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000537- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
538 build under OS X.
539
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000540- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
541 --enable-profiling.
542
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000543- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
544 is configured --with-tsc.
545
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000546- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
547 on AMD64.
548
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000549- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
550 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
551
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000552- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
553 removed.
554
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000555- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
556 supported (see PEP 11).
557
558- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
559
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000560- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
561
562- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
563 (see PEP 11).
564
565- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
566 sizeof(char) must be 1.
567
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000568C API
569-----
570
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000571- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
572 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
573 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
574
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000575- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
576 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
577 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
578 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
579
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000580- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
581 generator objects.
582
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000583- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
584 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000585 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
586 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000587
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000588- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
589 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
590
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000591- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
592 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
593 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
594 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
595 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
596
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000597- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
598 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
599 about 10% faster.
600
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000601- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
602 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
603
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000604- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
605 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
606 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
607 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
608
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000609New platforms
610-------------
611
612Tests
613-----
614
615Windows
616-------
617
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000618- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
619 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
620 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
621 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
622
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000623- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
624 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
625 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
626
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000627Mac
628----
629
630
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000631What's New in Python 2.3 final?
632===============================
633
634*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
635
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000636IDLE
637----
638
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000639- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
640 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
641 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
642 context-menu actions.
643
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000644- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
645 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
646 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
647 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
648 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
649 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
650 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
651 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
652 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
653
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000654
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000655What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
656=============================================
657
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000658*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000659
660Core and builtins
661-----------------
662
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000663- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000664 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000665 comment at the end are still unsupported.
666
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000667Extension modules
668-----------------
669
670- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
671 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
672 than once. This has been fixed.
673
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000674- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
675 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
676 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
677 call.
678
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000679- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
680
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000681Library
682-------
683
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000684- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
685 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
686
687- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
688 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
689 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
690 restored.
691
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000692IDLE
693----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000694
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000695- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000696
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000697Build
698-----
699
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000700- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
701 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
702
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000703C API
704-----
705
706Windows
707-------
708
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000709- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
710 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
711
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000712- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
713
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000714Mac
715---
716
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000717- Various fixes to pimp.
718
719- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
720
721- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
722 more problems than it solves.
723
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000724
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000725What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
726=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000727
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000728*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
729
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000730Core and builtins
731-----------------
732
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000733- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
734 by sys.setcheckinterval().
735
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000736- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
737 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000738 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000739
740- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
741 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
742 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000743 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000744
745- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
746 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000747
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000748- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
749 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
750 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
751
752- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000753 770247.
754
755- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000756
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000757Extension modules
758-----------------
759
760- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
761 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
762
763- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
764
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000765- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
766
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000767- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
768 contained within the _strptime module.
769
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000770- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
771 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
772
773- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000774 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
775
776- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
777 the find_class attribute, if present.
778
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000779- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000780
781 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
782 (SF bug 763298).
783
784 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000785 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
786 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
787 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000788
789 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
790
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000791Library
792-------
793
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000794- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
795
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000796- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
797 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
798 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
799 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
800 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
801 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
802 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
803 or Tester().
804
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000805- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
806 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
807 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
808 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
809 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
810 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
811 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
812 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
813 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000814
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000815 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000816
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000817- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
818 weren't before was an oversight.
819
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000820- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
821 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
822
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000823- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
824 when there are no lines.
825
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000826- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
827 which could occur with Tk 8.4
828
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000829- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
830 to child processes.
831
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000832- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
833
834- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
835
836- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
837 xmlrpclib.
838
839- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
840 responses.
841
842- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
843 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
844
845- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
846 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
847 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
848
849- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
850 used as patterns.
851
852- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
853 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
854 than Tk 8.3.
855
856- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
857
858- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000859
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000860Tools/Demos
861-----------
862
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000863- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
864
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000865- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
866
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000867- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000868
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000869Build
870-----
871
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000872- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
873
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000874- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
875
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000876- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
877 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000878
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000879- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
880 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
881 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000882
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000883C API
884-----
885
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000886- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
887 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
888
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000889Windows
890-------
891
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000892- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
893 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
894 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
895 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
896 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
897 Python exception ::
898
899 thread.error: can't start new thread
900
901 is raised now.
902
903- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
904 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
905 instead of from DLL teardown.
906
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000907Mac
908---
909
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000910- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000911 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000912 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
913 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
914 the executable in the bundle.
915
916- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000917
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000918- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
919
920- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
921 on Panther.
922
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000923What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
924================================
925
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000926*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000927
928Core and builtins
929-----------------
930
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000931- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
932 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
933 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
934 with the -i option.
935
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000936- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
937 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
938
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000939- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
940 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
941
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000942- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
943 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
944 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
945 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
946 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
947 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
948 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
949 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
950 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
951 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
952 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
953 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
954 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000955
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000956- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
957 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
958 embedded in a lambda expression.
959
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000960- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
961 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
962 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
963 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
964 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
965
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000966- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
967 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
968 matches the restriction on classic classes.
969
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000970- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
971 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
972
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000973- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
974 It's writable again.
975
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000976- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
977 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
978 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000979 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000980
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000981- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
982 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
983 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
984
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000985Extension modules
986-----------------
987
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000988- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
989 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
990
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000991- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
992 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
993 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
994 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
995
996- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
997 collection.
998
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000999- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1000 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1001 unique within a single program run.
1002
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001003- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1004 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1005
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001006- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1007 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1008
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001009- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1010 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001011
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001012- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1013
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001014- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1015 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1016
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001017- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1018 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1019 for many BSD-derived systems.
1020
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001021
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001022Library
1023-------
1024
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001025- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1026 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1027 primary ones:
1028
1029 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1030 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1031 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1032
1033 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1034 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1035 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1036 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1037 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1038 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1039
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001040- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1041 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1042 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1043 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1044 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1045 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1046 argument.
1047
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001048- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1049 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1050 in the archive.
1051
1052- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1053 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1054
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001055- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1056 569574).
1057
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001058- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1059 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1060 no more.
1061
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001062- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1063 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1064 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1065 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1066 code coverage.
1067
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001068- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1069 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1070 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001071 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1072 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001073
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001074- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1075 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1076 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001077 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001078
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001079- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1080
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001081- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1082 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1083 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1084 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1085
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001086- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1087 handling.
1088
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001089- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1090 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1091
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001092- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1093 in socket.py.
1094
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001095- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1096
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001097- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1098 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1099 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1100 opener with proxy support.
1101
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001102- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1103
1104- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1105
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001106Tools/Demos
1107-----------
1108
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001109- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1110
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001111- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1112
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001113- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1114 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001115
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001116- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1117 files.
1118
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001119Build
1120-----
1121
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001122- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001123 different root directory.
1124
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001125C API
1126-----
1127
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001128- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1129 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1130 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1131 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1132 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1133 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1134 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1135 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1136 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1137 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1138
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001139- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1140 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1141 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1142 from Python.
1143
1144
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001145New platforms
1146-------------
1147
1148None this time.
1149
1150Tests
1151-----
1152
1153- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1154 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1155
1156Windows
1157-------
1158
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001159- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1160
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001161- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1162 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1163 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1164 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1165 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1166 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1167 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1168 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1169 that's what it's for.
1170
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001171Mac
1172---
1173
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001174- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1175 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1176 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1177 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001178- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1179 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1180- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001181
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001182SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1183------------------------------------
1184
1185430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1186598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1187622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1188661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1189683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1190697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1191713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1192724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1193727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1194729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1195730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1196731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1197732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1198733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1199735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1200740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1201744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1202745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1203747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1204749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1205751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1206753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1207755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1208757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1209760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1210
1211
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001212What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1213================================
1214
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001215*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001216
1217Core and builtins
1218-----------------
1219
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001220- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1221 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1222
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001223- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1224 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1225 and cannot be strings).
1226
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001227- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1228 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1229 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1230 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1231
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001232- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1233 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1234 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1235 Python itself.
1236
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001237- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1238 the referenced object, if it has one.
1239
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001240- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1241 the thread started at
1242 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1243
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001244- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1245 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1246 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1247 placed on a list index.
1248
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001249- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1250 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1251 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1252 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1253
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001254- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1255 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1256 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1257 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1258 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1259 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1260 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1261
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001262- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1263 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1264 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1265 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1266 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1267
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001268- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1269 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001270
1271- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1272 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1273 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1274 #693195.)
1275
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001276- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1277 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001278
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001279- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001280 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001281 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1282 interpreter executions, would fail.
1283
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001284- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001285 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001286 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001287
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001288Extension modules
1289-----------------
1290
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001291- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1292 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1293 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1294 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1295
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001296- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1297 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1298
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001299- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1300 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1301 and Greg Chapman.)
1302
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001303- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1304 recursively.
1305
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001306- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001307 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1308 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1309 leaks.
1310
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001311- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1312
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001313- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1314 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1315 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1316 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1317 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1318 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1319 #705836.
1320
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001321- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001322 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1323
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001324- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1325 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1326 See SF bug #692416.
1327
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001328- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1329 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1330
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001331- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1332 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1333 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001334
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001335- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001336 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1337 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1338
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001339- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1340 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1341 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1342 timeouts to work properly.
1343
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001344Library
1345-------
1346
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001347- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1348 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1349 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1350 future release.
1351
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001352- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1353 for querying platform dependent features.
1354
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001355- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001356
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001357- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1358 pickle protocol versions.
1359
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001360- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1361 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1362 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1363
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001364- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1365
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001366- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1367 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1368 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1369 modules.
1370
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001371- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1372 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1373 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1374
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001375- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1376 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1377
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001378- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1379 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1380 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1381
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001382- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001383 MS Office extensions.
1384
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001385- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1386 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1387
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001388- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1389 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1390
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001391- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1392 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1393 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1394 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1395 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1396 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1397
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001398- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1399 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1400 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001401
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001402- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1403 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1404 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1405
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001406- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1407
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001408- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1409 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1410 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1411
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001412Tools/Demos
1413-----------
1414
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001415- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1416 See the module docstring for details.
1417
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001418Build
1419-----
1420
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001421- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1422 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001423
1424C API
1425-----
1426
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001427- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1428
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001429- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1430 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1431 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1432
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001433- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1434 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001435
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001436 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1437 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1438 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001439
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001440- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001441 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1442
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001443- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1444 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1445 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001446
1447New platforms
1448-------------
1449
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001450None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001451
1452Tests
1453-----
1454
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001455- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1456 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001457
1458Windows
1459-------
1460
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001461- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1462 function.
1463
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001464- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1465 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001466
1467Mac
1468---
1469
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001470- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1471 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001472
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001473- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1474 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001475
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001476- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1477 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1478 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001479
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001480- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001481 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1482 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001483
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001484- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1485 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001486
1487
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001488What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1489=================================
1490
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001491*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001492
1493Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001494-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001495
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001496- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1497 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1498 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1499
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001500- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1501 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1502 (SF patch #664376.)
1503
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001504- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1505 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1506 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1507 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1508 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1509 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001510 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001511
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001512- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1513 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1514 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1515 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001516 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001517
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001518- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1519 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1520 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1521 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1522 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1523 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1524 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1525 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1526 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1527 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1528 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1529
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001530- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1531 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1532 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1533 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1534 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1535 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1536
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001537- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1538 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1539
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001540- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1541 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1542 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1543 case.)
1544
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001545- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1546 passed as unicode strings.
1547
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001548- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1549 See SF bug #683467.
1550
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001551- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1552 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1553
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001554- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1555
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001556- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1557
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001558- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1559 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1560 arguments.
1561
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001562- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1563 See SF bug #667147.
1564
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001565- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001566 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001567 See SF bug #676155.
1568
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001569- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001570 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001571 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1572 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1573 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1574 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1575 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1576 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001577
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001578Extension modules
1579-----------------
1580
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001581- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1582 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1583 tp_as_number pointer.
1584
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001585- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1586 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1587 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1588 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1589 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1590
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001591- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1592
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001593- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1594
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001595- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001596 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001597 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1598 patch #678531.)
1599
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001600- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1601 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1602
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001603- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1604 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1605
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001606- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1607
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001608- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1609 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1610 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1611
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001612- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1613
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001614- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1615 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1616
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001617- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001618
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001619- datetime changes:
1620
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001621 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1622
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001623 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1624 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1625 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1626 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1627 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1628 now.
1629
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001630 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001631 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1632 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001633
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001634 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001635 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001636 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1637 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1638 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1639 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001640
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001641 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1642 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1643 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001644 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1645
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001646 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1647 by a later example coded by Guido.
1648
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001649 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001650 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1651 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1652 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001653 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1654 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1655
1656 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1657 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1658 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1659 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1660 tzinfo subclass instance.
1661
1662 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1663 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1664 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1665 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1666 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1667 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1668 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1669 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001670
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001671 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1672 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1673 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1674 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1675 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001676 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1677
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001678 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001679
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001680 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1681 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1682 as a naive datetime object.
1683
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001684 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1685 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1686 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1687
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001688 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1689 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1690 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1691 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1692 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1693 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1694 comparison.
1695
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001696 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1697 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1698 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1699 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001700 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001701
1702 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001703
1704 and ::
1705
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001706 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1707
1708 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1709 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1710 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1711 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1712
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001713 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1714 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1715 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1716 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1717 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1718
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001719 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1720 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001721 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1722 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001723
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001724Library
1725-------
1726
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001727- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1728 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1729
1730- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1731 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1732 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1733 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1734 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1735 See PEP 307 for details.
1736
1737- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1738 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1739
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001740- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1741 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001742 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001743 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1744 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001745 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001746
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001747- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1748 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1749
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001750- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1751 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1752 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1753
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001754- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1755
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001756- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1757 exception.
1758
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001759- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1760 class.
1761
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001762- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1763 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1764 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1765
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001766- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1767 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1768
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001769- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001770 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1771 See SF bug #659228.
1772
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001773- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1774 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1775 See SF patch #651082.
1776
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001777- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001778
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001779- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1780 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1781
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001782- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001783 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001784
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001785- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1786 DOS paths from other platforms.
1787
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001788Tools/Demos
1789-----------
1790
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001791- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1792 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1793 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1794 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1795 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1796 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1797 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1798 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1799 example:
1800
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001801 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1802 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001803
1804 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1805
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001806
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001807Build
1808-----
1809
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001810- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1811 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1812 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001813 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1814
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001815 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1816
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001817- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1818 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1819 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1820 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1821 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1822 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1823 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1824 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1825 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1826
1827- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1828 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1829 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1830 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1831
1832- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1833 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1834
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001835C API
1836-----
1837
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001838- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1839 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001840
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001841- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1842 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1843 tp_as_number pointer.
1844
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001845- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1846 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1847 (SF #681367)
1848
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001849- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1850 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1851 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1852 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001853
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001854Tests
1855-----
1856
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001857- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001858 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1859 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1860 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1861 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1862 pydoc.)
1863
1864- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1865
1866- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001867
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001868Windows
1869-------
1870
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001871- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1872 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1873 time).
1874
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001875- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1876 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1877
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001878- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1879 release without strong cryptography.
1880
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001881- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001882 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001883
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001884- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1885 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1886
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001887Mac
1888---
1889
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001890- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1891 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001892
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001893- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1894 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1895 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001896
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001897- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1898 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001899
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001900- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1901 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1902 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1903 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001904
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001905- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001906 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1907 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1908 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001909
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001910
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001911What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001912=================================
1913
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001914*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001915
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001916Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001917--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001918
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001919- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1920
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001921- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1922 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001923 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001924 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001925 a different meaning than before.
1926
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001927- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001928 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001929 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001930
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001931- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001932 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001933 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001934
1935- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1936 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1937 and deallocation.
1938
1939- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1940 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1941
1942- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1943 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1944 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1945 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1946 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1947
1948- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1949 now detected by the garbage collector.
1950
1951- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1952 [SF bug 519621]
1953
1954- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1955 identifier.
1956
1957- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1958 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1959 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1960 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1961 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1962 [SF bug 563060]
1963
1964- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1965 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1966 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1967 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1968 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1969
1970- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1971 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1972 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1973
1974- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1975
1976- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1977 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1978 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1979 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1980 state of the slots would be lost.)
1981
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001982Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001983-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001984
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001985- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001986 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1987 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1988 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1989 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001990 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1991 Jython 2.1.
1992
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001993- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001994 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001995 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1996 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1997 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1998 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1999 these, see PEP 302.
2000
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002001- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2002 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2003 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2004
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002005- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2006 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2007 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2008
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002009- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2010 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2011 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2012
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002013- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2014 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2015 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2016 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2017 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2018 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2019 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2020 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2021 releases or implementations.
2022
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002023- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002024 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2025 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002026
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002027- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2028 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2029
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002030- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2031 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2032 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2033
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002034- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2035 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2036
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002037- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2038 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002039 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2040 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002041
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002042- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2043 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2044 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2045 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2046 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2047
2048 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2049 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2050 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2051 pattern.
2052
2053 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2054 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2055 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2056 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2057
2058 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2059 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2060 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2061 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2062 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2063 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2064
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002065- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2066 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2067 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2068 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2069 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2070 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2071 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2072 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002073
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002074- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2075 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2076 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2077 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2078 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002079 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2080 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2081 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2082 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2083 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2084 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2085 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002086
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002087- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2088 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2089
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002090- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2091 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2092 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2093 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2094 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2095 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2096 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2097 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2098 to Zack Weinberg!
2099
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002100- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2101 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2102 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2103 type. This has been fixed now.
2104
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002105- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2106 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2107 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2108
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002109- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2110 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2111 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2112 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2113 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2114 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2115 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2116 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002117 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002118
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002119- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2120 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2121 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002122
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002123- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2124 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2125 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2126 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2127 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2128 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2129 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2130 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002131 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002132 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2133 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2134
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002135- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2136 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2137 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2138 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2139 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2140 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2141 this.)
2142
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002143- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2144 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002145 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002146 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002147 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2148 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002149 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2150 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002151
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002152- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2153 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2154 currently running.
2155
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002156- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2157 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2158 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2159 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2160
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002161- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2162 as directory names.
2163
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002164- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2165 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2166
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002167- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2168 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2169
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002170- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002171 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2172 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002173
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002174- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2175 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2176 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2177 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2178 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2179
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002180- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2181 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2182 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2183 removed.
2184
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002185- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2186 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2187 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2188
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002189- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2190 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2191 to __debug__.
2192
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002193- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2194 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2195 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2196
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002197- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2198 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2199 deprecated now.
2200
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002201- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2202 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2203 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002204
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002205- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2206 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2207 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2208 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2209 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002210
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002211- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2212 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2213
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002214- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2215 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2216 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002217 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002218 is backward compatible.
2219
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002220- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2221 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2222 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2223 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2224 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2225
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002226- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2227 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2228 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2229 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2230 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2231 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002232
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002233- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2234 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2235
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002236- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2237 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2238
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002239- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2240 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2241 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2242 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2243 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2244
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002245- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2246 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2247 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2248
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002249- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002250 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2251
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002252- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2253 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2254 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002255
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002256- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2257 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2258
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002259- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2260 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2261 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2262
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002263- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2264
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002265Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002266-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002267
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002268- Added three operators to the operator module:
2269 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2270 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2271 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2272
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002273- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2274
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002275- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2276 archives.
2277
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002278- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2279 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2280 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2281
2282 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2283
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002284- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2285 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2286 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002287 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002288
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002289- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2290 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2291 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2292 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002293 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2294 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2295 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2296 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002297
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002298- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2299 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002300
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002301- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2302
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002303- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2304 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2305
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002306- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2307 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2308 supported.
2309
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002310- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2311
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002312- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2313 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002314
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002315- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2316 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2317
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002318- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2319
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002320- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2321 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2322
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002323- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2324 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2325 functions but callable type objects.
2326
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002327- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002328 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002329 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002330
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002331- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2332 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002333
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002334- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2335 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002336
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002337- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2338 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2339 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2340 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2341
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002342- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2343 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002344
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002345- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2346 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2347 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2348 and __imul__.
2349
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002350- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002351 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2352 is called.
2353
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002354- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2355 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2356 interpreter was compiled.
2357
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002358- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2359 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2360 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002361 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002362 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2363 1, not 2.
2364
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002365- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2366 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2367 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2368 limit.
2369
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002370- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2371 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2372 bug #623464.
2373
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002374- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2375 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2376 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2377 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2378
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002379Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002380-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002381
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002382- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2383
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002384- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2385 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2386 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2387 with Python 2.3a2.
2388
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002389- os.path exposes getctime.
2390
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002391- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002392 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002393 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002394 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002395 unit tests of floating point results.
2396
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002397- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2398 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2399 has been increased.
2400
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002401- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2402 executed.
2403
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002404- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2405 postinstallation script.
2406
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002407- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2408 test the current module.
2409
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002410- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002411 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2412 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2413 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2414 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2415
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002416- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002417 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002418 Ward's Optik package.
2419
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002420- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2421 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2422 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2423 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2424
2425- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2426 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002427 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002428
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002429- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2430 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2431 shelf are binary pickles.
2432
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002433- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2434 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2435
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002436- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2437 modules are iterators now.
2438
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002439- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2440 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2441 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2442 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2443 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2444 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002445
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002446- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2447 with their entity value.
2448
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002449- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2450
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002451- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2452 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002453
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002454- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2455 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002456 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002457
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002458- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2459 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2460 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2461 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2462 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2463 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2464 main():
2465
2466 import locale
2467 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2468
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002469- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2470 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2471
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002472- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2473 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2474 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2475 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2476 to the new standard.
2477
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002478- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2479 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2480 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2481 an extension to the database.
2482
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002483- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2484 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2485 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2486 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002487 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002488
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002489- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002490 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002491
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002492- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2493 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2494 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2495 bounded integers.
2496
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002497- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2498 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2499 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2500 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2501 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2502 in existence.
2503
2504 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2505 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2506 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2507 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2508 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2509 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2510
2511 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2512 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2513 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2514 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2515
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002516- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2517 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2518 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2519
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002520- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2521
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002522- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2523 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2524 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2525 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2526
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002527- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2528 argument.
2529
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002530- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2531 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2532 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2533 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2534 [SF patch 560794].
2535
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002536- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2537 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2538 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002539 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2540 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2541 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002542
2543- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2544 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002545
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002546- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2547 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2548 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2549 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002550
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002551- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2552 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2553 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2554 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2555 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2556
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002557- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002558
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002559- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2560
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002561- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2562 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2563 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2564 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2565 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2566 identical to None.
2567
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002568- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2569 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2570 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2571 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2572 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2573 results now.
2574
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002575- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2576 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2577
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002578- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2579 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2580 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2581 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2582 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2583 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2584 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2585 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2586
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002587- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2588
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002589- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2590 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2591
2592- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2593 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2594 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2595 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2596 and other systems.
2597
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002598- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2599 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2600 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2601 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 +00002602 work well with these.
2603
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002604- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2605
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002606- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002607 connections.
2608
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002609- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2610 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2611 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2612
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002613- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2614 sets
2615
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002616- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2617 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2618 name.
2619
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002620- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2621 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2622 passed in.
2623
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002624- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002625 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002626 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2627 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002628
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002629- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2630
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002631- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2632
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002633- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2634 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2635 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2636
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002637- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2638 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2639 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2640 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002641 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002642
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002643- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002644 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002645 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002646
2647- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2648 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2649 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2650
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002651- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002652 the value of its expression argument.
2653
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002654- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2655 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2656 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2657
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002658- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2659 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2660 skipstone browser was included.
2661
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002662- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2663 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2664
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002665Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002666-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002667
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002668- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2669 names in addition to accepting file names.
2670
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002671- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2672 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2673 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2674 still used and useful.)
2675
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002676- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2677 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2678 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2679 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002680
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002681- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2682 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2683 the generated binary.
2684
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002686-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002687
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002688- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2689
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002690- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2691 except in the hands of experts.
2692
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002693- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002694 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2695 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2696 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002697
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002698- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2699 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2700 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2701 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2702 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2703 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2704 builds.
2705
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002706- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2707 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2708 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2709 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2710 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2711 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2712 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2713 new type.
2714
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002715- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002716
2717 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2718 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2719 positive infinities.
2720
2721 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2722 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2723 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2724 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2725 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2726 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2727 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2728
2729 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2730
2731 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2732
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002733- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2734 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2735 size of the executable.
2736
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002737- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2738 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2739 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2740 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002741
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002742- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2743
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002744- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2745 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2746 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002747
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002748- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2749 well as Unix.
2750
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002751- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2752 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2753 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2754 modules in the README file for details.
2755
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002756C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002757-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002758
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002759- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2760 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002761 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002762 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002763 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002764
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002765- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2766 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2767 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2768 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2769 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2770 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002771 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002772 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2773 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2774 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2775 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2776 aligned.)
2777
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002778- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2779 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2780 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2781
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002782- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2783 level.
2784
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002785- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2786 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2787 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2788 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2789 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2790
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002791- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2792 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2793 code.
2794
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002795- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2796 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2797 adjusting for negative indices.
2798
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002799- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2800 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2801 object.
2802
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002803- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2804 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2805 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2806
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002807- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2808 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002809
2810- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2811
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002812- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2813 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2814 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2815 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2816
2817- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2818
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002819- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002820
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002821- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002822 without going through the buffer API.
2823
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002824- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002825
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002826- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2827 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2828 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2829 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2830
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002831- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2832 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2833
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002834- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002835 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2836
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002837New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002838-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002839
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002840- OpenVMS is now supported.
2841
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002842- AtheOS is now supported.
2843
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002844- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2845
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002846- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2847
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002848Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849-----
2850
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002851- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2852 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2853 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002854
2855Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002857
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002858- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2859 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2860 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2861 bugs.
2862 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002863 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002864 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2865 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002866 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002867
2868- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002869 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002870
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002871- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2872 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2873
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002874- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2875 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002876 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002877 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2878
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002879- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2880 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2881 use files" uninstall option).
2882
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002883- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2884
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002885- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2886 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2887
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002888- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2889 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2890 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2891
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002892- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2893 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2894 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2895 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2896 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002897 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2898 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2899 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002900
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002901- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002902 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002903 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2904 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2905 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2906 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2907 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2908 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2909 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2910 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2911 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2912 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2913 work around.
2914
2915- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2916 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2917 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2918 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2919 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2920 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2921 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2922 specified with O_CREAT too).
2923
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002924Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002925----
2926
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002927- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002928
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002929- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2930 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2931 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2932
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002933- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2934 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2935 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2936
2937- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2938 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2939 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2940 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2941 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2942 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2943 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2944 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002945
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002946- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2947 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2948 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002949
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002950- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2951 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2952 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2953 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2954 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002955
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002956- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2957 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2958 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002959
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002960- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2961 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002962
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002963- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2964 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2965 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2966 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2967 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002968
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002969- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2970 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2971 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2972
2973- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2974 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2975 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002976
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002977- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2978 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2979 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2980 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002981 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002982
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002983- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2984 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002985
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002986- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2987 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002988
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002989- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002990 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002991 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2992 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002993
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002994
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002995What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002996===============================
2997
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2999
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003000Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003002
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003003- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3004 with a custom metaclass.
3005
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003006Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003008
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003009- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3010 are proxies.
3011
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003012Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003014
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003015- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3016 very short strings.
3017
3018- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3019 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3020 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3021 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3022 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3023
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003024Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003026
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003027- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3028 close or delete time).
3029
3030- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3031 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3032
3033- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3034
3035- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003036 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003037
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003038Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003040
3041Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003042-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003043
3044C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003045-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003046
3047New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003048-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003049
3050Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003051-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003052
3053Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003055
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003056- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3057
3058- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3059 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3060
3061- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3062 deleted at process exit time.
3063
3064- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3065 in backslash.
3066
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003067Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003069
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003070- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3071 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3072 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3073
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003074
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003075What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003076===========================
3077
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3079
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003080Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003081--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003082
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003083- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3084 been extensively updated. See
3085
3086 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3087
3088 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3089
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003090- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3091 deleted!
3092
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003093- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3094 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3095 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3096 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3097 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3098
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003099- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3100
3101 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3102 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3103
3104 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3105 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3106 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3107 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3108 supported anyway.
3109
3110 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3111 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3112
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003113- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3114 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3115 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3116 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3117 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003118
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003119- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3120 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3121 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3122
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003123Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003125
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003126- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3127 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3128 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3129 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3130 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3131 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003132 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3133 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3134 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3135 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003136
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003137- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3138 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3139 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3140
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003141Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003143
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003144- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3145
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003146Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003147-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003148
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003149- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3150 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3151 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3152 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3153 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3154 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3155
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003156- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3157
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003158- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3159
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003160- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3161
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003162- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3163 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3164 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3165
3166- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3167
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003168Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003169-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003170
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003171- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3172 off a search on Google.
3173
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003174Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003175-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003176
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003177- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3178 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3179 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3180 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3181 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3182 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3183 other platforms should do likewise.
3184
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003185- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3186 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3187 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3188
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003189C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003191
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003192- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3193 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3194 producing key-value pairs.
3195
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003196- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003197 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003198 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3199 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3200 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3201 previously went unchallenged.
3202
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003203New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003205
3206Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003207-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003208
3209Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003211
3212Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003213----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003214
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003215- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3216 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003217
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003218- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3219 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3220 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3221 home.
3222
3223
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003224What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003225===========================
3226
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003227*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3228
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003229Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003230--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003231
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003232- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3233 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003234
3235 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003236 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003237
3238 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3239 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003240 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003241 This needs to be documented.
3242
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003243- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3244 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3245
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003246- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3247 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3248 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3249
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003250- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3251 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3252
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003253- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3254 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3255 class forbids it).
3256
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003257- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3258 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3259 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3260
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003261- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3262
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003263Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003264-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003265
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003266- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3267 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003268 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003269
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003270- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3271 (like 1 + '').
3272
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003273Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003275
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003276- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3277 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3278 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3279 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003280 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003281 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3282
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003283- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3284 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3285 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3286 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3287
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003288- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3289 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003290 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3291 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3292 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003293
3294- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3295 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003296
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003297- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3298 bytes on its input.
3299
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003300Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003301-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003302
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003303- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003304 convenience function.
3305
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003306- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3307 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3308 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003309 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3310 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3311 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3312 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3313 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3314 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003315
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003316- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3317 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3318 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3319 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3320
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003321- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3322 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3323 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3324
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003325- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3326 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3327 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3328 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3329
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003330- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3331 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003333 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3334 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3335 new -l and -e options.
3336
3337- statcache is now deprecated.
3338
3339- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3340 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003341 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003342 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3343 time properly taken into account.
3344
3345- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3346 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3347 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3348 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3349
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003350Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003351-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003352
3353Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003355
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003356- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3357 is built with libdb3 if available.
3358
3359- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3360
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003361C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003363
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003364- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3365 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3366 PySequence_Size().
3367
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003368- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3369
3370- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3371 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3372 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3373
3374- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3375 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3376
3377- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3378 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3379
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003380New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003381-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003382
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003383- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3384 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3385
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003386- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3387 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3388
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003389- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3390
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003391Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003393
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003394- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3395 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3396
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003397Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003398-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003399
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003400Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003401----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003402
3403- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3404 removed completely in the next release.
3405
3406- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3407 OSX.
3408
3409- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3410 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3411
3412- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3413
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003414
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003415What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003416===========================
3417
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3419
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003420Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003421--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003422
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003423- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003424 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003425 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003426 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3427 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003428 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3429 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003430 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3431 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003432
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003433- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3434 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3435
3436- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3437 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3438
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003439Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003440-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003441
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003442- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3443 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3444 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3445 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3446 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3447 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3448 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3449 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3450
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003451- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3452 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3453 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3454 example).
3455
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003456- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003457 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003458 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003459 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003460
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003461- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3462 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3463 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003464 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003465
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003466- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3467 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3468 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3469 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3470 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3471 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3472
3473 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3474
3475 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3476
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003477Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003479
3480- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3481
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003482- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3483
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003484- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3485 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003486
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003487- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3488 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3489 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3490 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3491 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3492 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003493 attributes.
3494
3495- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3496 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3497 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003498
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003499- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3500 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3501 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003502
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003503- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3504 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3505 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003506 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3507 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3508
3509- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3510 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003511
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003512Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003514
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003515- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3516 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3517
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003518- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3519 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3520 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3521 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3522
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003523- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3524 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3525 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3526 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3527
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003528 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3529 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3530 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3531 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3532 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3533 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3534 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3535 without losing information).
3536
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003537- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003538 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3539 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3540 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3541 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3542 module).
3543
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003544 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003545 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3546 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3547 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3548 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003549
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003550- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003551 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3552 encoding.
3553
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003554- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3555 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3556
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003557- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003558 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3559
3560- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3561 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3562 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3563 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3564
3565- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3566
3567- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3568 ON, and OFF.
3569
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003570- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3571 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3572
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003573Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003575
3576- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3577 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3578 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003579
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003580- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3581 been added: -X and -E.
3582
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003583Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003585
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003586- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3587 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3588
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003589C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003591
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003592- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3593 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3594 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3595 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3596 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3597
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003598- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3599 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3600 as long) arguments.
3601
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003602- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3603 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3604 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3605 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3606 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3607 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3608
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003609- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3610 input.
3611
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003612New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003614
3615Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003617
3618Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003620
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003621- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3622 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3623 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3624
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003625- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3626 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3627 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003628 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003629
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3631 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3632 import signal
3633 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003634
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003635 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003636 while 1:
3637 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003639 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3640 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3641 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3642 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003643
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003644
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003645What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3646===========================
3647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3649
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003650Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003652
3653- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3654 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3655 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3656
3657- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3658 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3659 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3660 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3661 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3662 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3663 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003664
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003665- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003666 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003667 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3668 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3669 associate a docstring with a property.
3670
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003671- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3672 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3673 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3674 other built-in object types.
3675
3676- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3677 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3678 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3679 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3680 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3681
3682- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3683 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3684
3685- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3686 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003687 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003688 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3689 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3690 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3691 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3692 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3693
3694- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3695 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3696 class.
3697
3698- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3699 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3700 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3701 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3702
3703- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3704 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3705 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3706 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3707
3708- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3709 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3710
3711- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3712 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3713 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3714 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3715 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003716 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003717 with the same value as s.
3718
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003719- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3720
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003721Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003723
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003724- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3725
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003726- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3727 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3728 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3729 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3730 objects.
3731
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003732- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3733 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003734 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3735 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3736
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003737- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3738 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3739 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3740
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003741Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003743
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003744- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3745 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3746 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3747 by the instances.
3748
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003749- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3750 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3751 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3752
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003753- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3754 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3755 before the entire comparison is complete.
3756
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003757- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3758 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3759 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3760
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003761- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3762 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3763 getwriter().
3764
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003765- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3766 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3767
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003768- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003769 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3770 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3771
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003772- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3773 iterable object.
3774
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003775- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3776 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003777
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003778- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3779 authentication.
3780
3781- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3782 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003783
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003784- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003785 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3786 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3787 a sample driver.)
3788
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003789Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003791
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003792- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3793 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3794 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3795 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3796 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3797 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3798 kernel has large file support.
3799
3800- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3801 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3802 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3803 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3804 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3805
3806- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3807 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3808 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3809
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003810C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003812
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003813- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3814 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3815
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003816New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003818
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003819- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3820 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3821
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003822Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003824
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003825- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3826 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3827 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3828 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3829 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3830
3831- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3832 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3833 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3834 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3835
3836- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3837 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3838
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003839Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003841
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003842- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003843 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3844 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003845
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003846
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003847What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3848===========================
3849
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3851
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003852Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003854
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003855- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3856 big to represent as a C double.
3857
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003858- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3859 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3860 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3861 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3862 restriction).
3863
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003864- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3865 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3866 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3867 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3868 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3869
3870 >>> dir([])
3871 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3872 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3873 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3874 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3875 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3876 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3877 'reverse', 'sort']
3878
3879 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3880
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003881- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003882 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3883 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3884 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3885 OverflowError exception.
3886
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003887- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003888 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003889 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3890 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3891 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3892 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3893 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003894 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3896 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3897
3898 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3899 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3900 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3901 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003902
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003903- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003904 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3905 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3906 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3907 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3908 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3909 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3910 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3911 once it is created.
3912
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003913- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3914 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3915 (key, value) pairs.
3916
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003917- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003918 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3919 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3920
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003921- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3922 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3923 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3924 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3925 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003926
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003927- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003928 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3929 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3930
3931 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3932
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003933- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003934 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3935
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003936Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003938
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003939- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003940 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3941 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003942
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003943- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3944 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3945 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3946 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3947 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3948 in this area anymore).
3949
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003950- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3951 threading.Timer.
3952
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003953- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3954 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3955
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003956- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003957 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3958
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003959- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003960 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3961 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3962 converted to Python longs.
3963
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003964- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003965 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3966
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003967- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3968 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3969 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3970
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003971Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003973
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003974- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3975 division operators as per PEP 238.
3976
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003977Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003979
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003980- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3981 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3982 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3983 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3984
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003985C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003987
3988- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003989
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003990- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3991 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003992 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003993
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3995 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003996 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003998
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003999- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004000 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4001 module:
4002
4003 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004004
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004005 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4006 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004007
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004008 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4009 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004010
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004011 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4012
4013 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4014
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004015- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004016 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4017 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4018 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004019
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004020New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004022
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004023- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4024 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4025 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4026 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4027 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004028
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004029Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004031
4032Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004033-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004034
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004035- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4036 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4037 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4038 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004039 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4040 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4041 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4042 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4043 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004044
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004045- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004046 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4047
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004048
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004049What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4050===========================
4051
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4053
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004054Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004056
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004057- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4058 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4059
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004060- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4061 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4062 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004063
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004064- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4065 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4066 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4067 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004068
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004069- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4070
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004072
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004073Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004075
4076- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004077 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004078 the module docstring for details.
4079
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004080Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004082
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004083- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004084 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4085 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4086 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004087
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004088- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4089 Nick Mathewson.
4090
4091Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004093
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004094- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4095 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4096 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4097 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4098 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4099 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4100 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4101 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4102
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004103- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4104 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4105 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4106 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4107
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004108- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4109 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4110 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4111 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4112 come a long way).
4113
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004114- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4115 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4116 write filters for these warnings).
4117
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004118- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4119 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4120 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4121 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4122 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4123
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004124- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4125 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4126 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4127 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4128 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4129 older distribution.
4130
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004131Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004133
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004134- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4135 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004136 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004137
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004138- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4139 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4140 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4141
4142- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4143
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004144- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4145
4146- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4147
4148- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4149
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004150- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004151
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004152- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4153
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004154New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004156
4157C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004159
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004160- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4161 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4162 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4163 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4164 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4165 against buffer overruns.
4166
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004167- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004168 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4169 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004170 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4171 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4172 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4173
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004174- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4175 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4176 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4177 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4178 deprecated.
4179
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004180Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004182
4183- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4184 relevant is found.
4185
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004186
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004187What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004188===========================
4189
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4191
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004192Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004193----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004194
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004195- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4196 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4197 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4198 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4199 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4200 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4201 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4202 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004203 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004204 repaired.
4205
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004206- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004207 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004208 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4209 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4210 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4211 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4212 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4213 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4214 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4215 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4216
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004217- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4218 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4219 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4220 leading BMO character).
4221
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004222- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4223 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4224 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4225
4226 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4227 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4228 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004229
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004230 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4231 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4232 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4233 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4234 for various simple to use conversions.
4235
4236 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4237 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4240 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4241 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4242 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4243 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4244 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4245 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4246 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4247 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4248 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4249 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4250 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4251 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4252 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4253 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004254
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004255- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4256 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4257 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004258 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004259 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004260
4261 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004262 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4263 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4264 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4265 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4266 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004267 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4268 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004269
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004270 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4271 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4272 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004273 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004274
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004275- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4276 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4277 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4278 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4279 floating arithmetic,
4280
4281 x = 9007199254740992.0
4282 print long(x)
4283
4284 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4285 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4286 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4287 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4288 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4289 functions are of good quality).
4290
4291 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4292 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4293 algorithms to break.
4294
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004295- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4296 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4297 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4298 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4299 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4300 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4301 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4302 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4303 order.
4304
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004305- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4306 operation along the most common code paths.
4307
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004308- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4309 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4310
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004311- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4312 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4313 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4314 {}.update(UserDict())
4315
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004316- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4317 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4318 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4319 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4320 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4321 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4322 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4323 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4324
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004325- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004326 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004328 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004329 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4330 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004331 join() method of strings
4332 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004333 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4334 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004336 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004337
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004338- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4339 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4340
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004341- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4342 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4343
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004344- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4345 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4346 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4347 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4348
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004349- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4350 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004351 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004352 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4353 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004354
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004355- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4356
4357
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004358Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004360
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004361- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004362 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004363 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4364 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4365
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004366- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4367 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4368
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004369- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4370 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4371 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4372 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4373
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004374- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4375 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4376 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4377
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004378- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4379
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004380- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4381
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004382- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4383 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4384 that are still imported into string.py).
4385
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004386- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4387
4388- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4389 Now it does.
4390
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004391- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4392
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004393- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4394 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4395 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4396 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4397 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004398 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4399 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004400
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004401- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4402 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4403 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4404 'help(object)'.
4405
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004406Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004408
4409- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004410 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004411 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4412 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4413
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004414- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004415 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4416 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004417
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004418C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004420
4421- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4422 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423
4424----
4425
4426**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**