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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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000015- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
16 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
17 modified the list.
18
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000019- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
20 functions is now writable.
21
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000022- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
23 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
24 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
25 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
26
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000027- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
28 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
29 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
30 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
31 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000032
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000033- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
34 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
35
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000036Extension modules
37-----------------
38
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000039- Added socket.socketpair().
40
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000041Library
42-------
43
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000044- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
45 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
46 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
47 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
48 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
49 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
50 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
51 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
52 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
53 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
54 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
55 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
56 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
57
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000058Tools/Demos
59-----------
60
61Build
62-----
63
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000064- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
65 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
66
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000067C API
68-----
69
70Documentation
71-------------
72
73New platforms
74-------------
75
76Tests
77-----
78
79Windows
80-------
81
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +000082- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
83 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
84 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
85 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
86 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
87 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
88 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
89 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
90 the problem.
91
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000092Mac
93---
94
95
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000096What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
97=================================
98
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000099*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000100
101Core and builtins
102-----------------
103
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000104- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
105 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
106 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
107 sensitive code.
108
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000109- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
110 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
111 @staticmethod
112 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000113 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000114
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000115- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
116 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
117 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
118 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
119 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
120 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
121 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
122 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
123 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
124 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
125 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
126
127 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
128 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
129 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
130 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
131 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
132 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
133 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
134
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000135- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
136 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
137
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000138- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000139 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000140
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000141- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000142 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000143 which was missing for no apparent reason.
144
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000145- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000146 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
147 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
148
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000149- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
150 types that support garbage collection.
151
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000152- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
153
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000154- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
155 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
156 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
157 Jython.
158
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000159- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
160
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000161- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
162 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
163
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000164- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
165 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
166 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000167
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000168- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
169 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
170 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
171
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000172Extension modules
173-----------------
174
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000175- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
176
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000177Library
178-------
179
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000180- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
181 TIS-620
182
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000183- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
184 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
185 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
186 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
187 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
188 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
189 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
190 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
191 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
192 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
193
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000194- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
195
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000196- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
197 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
198 same as when the argument is omitted).
199 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
200
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000201- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
202
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000203- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
204 schemes are offered.
205
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000206- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
207
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000208- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
209 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
210 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
211
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000212- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
213
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000214- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
215 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
216
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000217- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
218 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
219 when dummy_threading is being used.
220
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000221- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
222 from a tarfile.
223
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000224- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000225 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000226
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000227- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
228 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
229 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
230 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
231
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000232- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
233 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
234
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000235- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
236 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
237 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
238 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
239 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
240 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
241 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
242 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
243 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
244 by some other method in progress).
245
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000246- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
247 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
248 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000249
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000250- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
251
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000252- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
253 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
254 AM Kuchling.
255
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000256- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
257 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
258 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
259
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000260- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
261 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
262 instead of unsigned.
263
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000264- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000265 no longer part of the public API.
266
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000267- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
268 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
269 string methods of the same name).
270
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000271- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
272 SF patch 982681.
273
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000274- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000275 SF patch 945642.
276
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000277- doctest unittest integration improvements:
278
279 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
280
281 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
282 DocTestSuites.
283
284- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
285 that provide thread-local data.
286
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000287- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
288 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
289
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000290- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
291
292- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
293 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
294 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
295
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000296- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
297
298 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
299 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
300 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000301
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000302 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
303 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
304 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
305 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
306
307 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
308 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
309
310 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
311 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
312 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
313 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
314
315 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
316 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
317 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
318 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
319 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
320
321 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
322 wrapping help output.
323
324 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
325 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
326 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000327
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000328C API
329-----
330
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000331- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
332 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
333 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
334 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
335 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
336 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
337 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
338 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
339 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
340 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
341 its visible semantics have not changed.
342
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000343- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
344 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
345
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000346Documentation
347-------------
348
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000349- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000350
351 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000352 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000353
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000354 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000355
356 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
357
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000358- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000359
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000360Tests
361-----
362
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000363- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000364 platforms that use the Makefile.
365
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000366- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
367 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
368 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
369
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000370
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000371What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
372=================================
373
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000374*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000375
376Core and builtins
377-----------------
378
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000379- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
380 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
381 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
382 objects now (one object instead of three).
383
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000384- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
385 Windows DLLs.
386
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000387- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
388 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000389
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000390- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
391 a new .pyc magic.
392
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000393- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
394 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
395 be there.
396
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000397- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
398 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
399 the LC_NUMERIC category.
400
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000401- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
402 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
403 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
404
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000405- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
406
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000407- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
408 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
409 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000410
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000411- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
412 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
413
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000414- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
415
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000416- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000417 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000418
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000419- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
420
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000421- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
422
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000423- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
424 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
425
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000426- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
427 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
428 Fixes bug #858016 .
429
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000430- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
431 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
432 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
433
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000434- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
435 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
436 improves their performance (about 35%).
437
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000438- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
439 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
440 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
441
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000442- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
443 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
444 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
445 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
446
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000447- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
448 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
449 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
450 length is not known).
451
452- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
453 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000454 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
455 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000456 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
457
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000458- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
459 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
460
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000461- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
462 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
463 keyword arguments.
464
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000465- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
466 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
467 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
468
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000469- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
470 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
471 cases.
472
473- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
474 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
475 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
476 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
477 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
478 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
479 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
480 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
481 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
482 a release build.
483
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000484- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
485 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
486
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000487- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000488 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000489
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000490- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
491 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
492 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
493 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
494 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
495 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
496 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
497 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
498 destroyed.
499
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000500- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
501 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
502 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
503 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
504 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
505 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
506 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
507 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
508
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000509- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
510 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
511 character other than a space.
512
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000513- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
514 by the function object or by the method object, the function
515 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
516 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
517 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
518 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
519 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
520 attributes with the same name.
521
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000522- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
523 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
524 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
525 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
526 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
527 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
528 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
529 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
530 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
531 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
532 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
533 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
534 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
535 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000536
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000537- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
538 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
539 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
540 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
541 This has been repaired.
542
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000543- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
544
545- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
546
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000547- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
548 over a sequence.
549
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000550- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000551 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000552
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000553- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
554
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000555- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
556 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
557 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
558 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
559 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
560 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
561 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
562 records with equal keys is unchanged).
563
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000564- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
565 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
566 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
567
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000568- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
569 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
570 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
571 freelist.
572
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000573- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
574 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
575
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000576- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
577 number.
578
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000579- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
580 a TypeError exception.
581
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000582- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
583 820195.
584
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000585- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
586 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
587 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
588
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000589- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000590 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
591 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000592
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000593- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
594 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
595 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
596
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000597- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
598 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000599 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000600
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000601- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000602 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
603 the first call.
604
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000605
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000606Extension modules
607-----------------
608
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000609- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
610 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
611
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000612- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
613 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
614 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
615 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
616 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
617 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
618 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000619
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000620- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
621
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000622- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
623
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000624- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
625 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
626
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000627- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
628 fewer false positives.
629
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000630- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
631 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
632
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000633- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000634 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
635
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000636- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000637 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000638 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
639 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
640 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000641
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000642- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
643 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
644 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
645 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
646
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000647- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
648 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
649 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
650 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
651 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
652 #897625.
653
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000654- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
655 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
656
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000657- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
658 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
659 and pops on either side of the deque.
660
661- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
662 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
663
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000664- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
665 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
666 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
667 other functions that expect a function argument.
668
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000669- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
670
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000671- os.getsid was added.
672
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000673- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
674 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
675 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
676
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000677- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
678
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000679- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
680
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000681- readline.clear_history was added.
682
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000683- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
684
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000685- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
686
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000687- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
688
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000689- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
690
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000691- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
692
693- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
694
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000695- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
696
697- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
698
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000699- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
700 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
701 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
702
703- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
704 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
705 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
706 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
707 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
708 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
709 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
710
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000711- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
712 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
713 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
714 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000715
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000716- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000717 iterators from a single iterable.
718
719- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
720 of raising a TypeError exception.
721
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000722- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
723 as parameter.
724
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000725Library
726-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000727
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000728- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
729 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
730 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000731
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000732- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
733 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
734 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000735
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000736- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000737
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000738- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
739 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000740
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000741- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
742 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
743
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000744- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
745
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000746- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000747 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000748
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000749- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
750 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
751
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000752- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
753
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000754- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
755 on cygwin and mingw32.
756
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000757- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
758
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000759- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
760 module.
761
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000762- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
763 installation scheme for all platforms.
764
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000765- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000766 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000767
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000768- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
769 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
770 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
771
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000772- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
773 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
774 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
775
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000776- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
777
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000778- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
779
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000780- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
781 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
782
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000783- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
784 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
785 type pattern with the same value exists.
786
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000787- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
788 when run from the command prompt).
789
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000790- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
791 not taken into consideration when caching value.
792
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000793- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
794 default sort).
795
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000796- Added global runctx function to profile module
797
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000798- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
799
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000800- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
801
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000802- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
803
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000804- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000805 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
806 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
807 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
808 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
809 accordingly.
810
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000811- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
812 decoding standards.
813
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000814- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
815 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
816 called for all requests.
817
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000818- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
819 they are passed to the compiler.
820
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000821- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
822 indent, width and depth.
823
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000824- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
825 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
826
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000827- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
828 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
829
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000830- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
831
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000832- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
833
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000834- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
835
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000836- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
837 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
838
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000839- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000840 for better performance.
841
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000842- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000843
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000844- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
845 a string).
846
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000847- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
848
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000849- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
850
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000851- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
852
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000853- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
854
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000855- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
856 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
857 list of fieldnames.
858
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000859- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
860 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
861
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000862- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
863
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000864- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
865 empty lists.
866
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000867- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
868 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
869 and shelves.
870
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000871- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
872 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
873
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000874- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000875 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
876 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000877
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000878- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
879 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000880 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000881
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000882- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000883 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
884 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
885
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000886- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
887 and removed in Py2.4.
888
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000889- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
890
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000891- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
892
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000893Tools/Demos
894-----------
895
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000896- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
897 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
898
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000899- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
900
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000901- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
902 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
903 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
904 destination in situations where both files are given.
905
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000906- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
907 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
908 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
909 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
910
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000911- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
912
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000913- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
914 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
915 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
916 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
917 now.
918
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000919- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
920 in effect
921
922- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
923 C-c C-h
924
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000925- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
926 -d option was given.
927
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000928Build
929-----
930
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000931- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
932 build under OS X.
933
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000934- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
935 --enable-profiling.
936
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000937- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
938 is configured --with-tsc.
939
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000940- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
941 on AMD64.
942
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000943- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
944 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
945
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000946- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
947 removed.
948
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000949- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
950 supported (see PEP 11).
951
952- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
953
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000954- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
955
956- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
957 (see PEP 11).
958
959- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
960 sizeof(char) must be 1.
961
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000962C API
963-----
964
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000965- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
966 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
967 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
968
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000969- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
970 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
971 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
972 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
973
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000974- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
975 generator objects.
976
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000977- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
978 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000979 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
980 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000981
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000982- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
983 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
984
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000985- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
986 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
987 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
988 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
989 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
990
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000991- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
992 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
993 about 10% faster.
994
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000995- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
996 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
997
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000998- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
999 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1000 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1001 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1002
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001003Windows
1004-------
1005
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001006- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1007 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1008 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1009 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1010
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001011- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1012 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1013 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1014
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001015
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001016What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1017===============================
1018
1019*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1020
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001021IDLE
1022----
1023
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001024- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1025 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1026 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1027 context-menu actions.
1028
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001029- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1030 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1031 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1032 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1033 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1034 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1035 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1036 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1037 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1038
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001039
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001040What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1041=============================================
1042
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001043*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001044
1045Core and builtins
1046-----------------
1047
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001048- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001049 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001050 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1051
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001052Extension modules
1053-----------------
1054
1055- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1056 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1057 than once. This has been fixed.
1058
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001059- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1060 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1061 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1062 call.
1063
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001064- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1065
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001066Library
1067-------
1068
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001069- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1070 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1071
1072- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1073 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1074 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1075 restored.
1076
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001077IDLE
1078----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001079
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001080- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001081
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001082Build
1083-----
1084
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001085- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1086 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1087
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001088C API
1089-----
1090
1091Windows
1092-------
1093
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001094- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1095 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1096
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001097- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1098
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001099Mac
1100---
1101
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001102- Various fixes to pimp.
1103
1104- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1105
1106- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1107 more problems than it solves.
1108
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001109
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001110What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1111=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001112
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001113*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1114
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001115Core and builtins
1116-----------------
1117
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001118- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1119 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1120
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001121- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1122 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001123 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001124
1125- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1126 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1127 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001128 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001129
1130- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1131 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001132
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001133- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1134 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1135 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1136
1137- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001138 770247.
1139
1140- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001141
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001142Extension modules
1143-----------------
1144
1145- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1146 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1147
1148- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1149
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001150- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1151
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001152- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1153 contained within the _strptime module.
1154
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001155- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1156 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1157
1158- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001159 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1160
1161- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1162 the find_class attribute, if present.
1163
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001164- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001165
1166 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1167 (SF bug 763298).
1168
1169 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001170 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1171 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1172 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001173
1174 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1175
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001176Library
1177-------
1178
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001179- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1180
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001181- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1182 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1183 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1184 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1185 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1186 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1187 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1188 or Tester().
1189
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001190- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1191 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1192 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1193 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1194 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1195 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1196 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1197 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1198 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001199
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001200 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001201
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001202- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1203 weren't before was an oversight.
1204
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001205- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1206 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1207
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001208- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1209 when there are no lines.
1210
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001211- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1212 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1213
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001214- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1215 to child processes.
1216
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001217- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1218
1219- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1220
1221- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1222 xmlrpclib.
1223
1224- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1225 responses.
1226
1227- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1228 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1229
1230- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1231 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1232 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1233
1234- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1235 used as patterns.
1236
1237- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1238 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1239 than Tk 8.3.
1240
1241- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1242
1243- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001244
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001245Tools/Demos
1246-----------
1247
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001248- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1249
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001250- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1251
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001252- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001253
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001254Build
1255-----
1256
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001257- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1258
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001259- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1260
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001261- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1262 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001263
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001264- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1265 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1266 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001267
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001268C API
1269-----
1270
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001271- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1272 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1273
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001274Windows
1275-------
1276
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001277- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1278 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1279 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1280 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1281 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1282 Python exception ::
1283
1284 thread.error: can't start new thread
1285
1286 is raised now.
1287
1288- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1289 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1290 instead of from DLL teardown.
1291
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001292Mac
1293---
1294
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001295- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001296 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001297 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1298 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1299 the executable in the bundle.
1300
1301- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001302
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001303- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1304
1305- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1306 on Panther.
1307
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001308What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1309================================
1310
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001311*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001312
1313Core and builtins
1314-----------------
1315
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001316- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1317 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1318 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1319 with the -i option.
1320
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001321- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1322 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1323
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001324- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1325 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1326
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001327- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1328 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1329 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1330 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1331 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1332 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1333 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1334 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1335 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1336 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1337 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1338 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1339 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001340
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001341- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1342 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1343 embedded in a lambda expression.
1344
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001345- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1346 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1347 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1348 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1349 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1350
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001351- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1352 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1353 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1354
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001355- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1356 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1357
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001358- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1359 It's writable again.
1360
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001361- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1362 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1363 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001364 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001365
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001366- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1367 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1368 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1369
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001370Extension modules
1371-----------------
1372
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001373- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1374 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1375
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001376- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1377 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1378 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1379 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1380
1381- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1382 collection.
1383
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001384- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1385 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1386 unique within a single program run.
1387
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001388- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1389 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1390
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001391- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1392 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1393
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001394- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1395 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001396
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001397- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1398
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001399- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1400 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1401
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001402- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1403 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1404 for many BSD-derived systems.
1405
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001406
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001407Library
1408-------
1409
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001410- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1411 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1412 primary ones:
1413
1414 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1415 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1416 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1417
1418 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1419 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1420 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1421 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1422 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1423 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1424
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001425- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1426 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1427 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1428 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1429 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1430 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1431 argument.
1432
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001433- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1434 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1435 in the archive.
1436
1437- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1438 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1439
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001440- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1441 569574).
1442
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001443- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1444 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1445 no more.
1446
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001447- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1448 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1449 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1450 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1451 code coverage.
1452
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001453- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1454 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1455 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001456 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1457 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001458
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001459- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1460 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1461 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001462 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001463
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001464- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1465
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001466- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1467 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1468 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1469 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1470
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001471- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1472 handling.
1473
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001474- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1475 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1476
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001477- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1478 in socket.py.
1479
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001480- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1481
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001482- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1483 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1484 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1485 opener with proxy support.
1486
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001487- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1488
1489- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1490
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001491Tools/Demos
1492-----------
1493
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001494- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1495
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001496- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1497
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001498- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1499 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001500
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001501- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1502 files.
1503
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001504Build
1505-----
1506
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001507- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001508 different root directory.
1509
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001510C API
1511-----
1512
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001513- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1514 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1515 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1516 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1517 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1518 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1519 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1520 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1521 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1522 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1523
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001524- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1525 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1526 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1527 from Python.
1528
1529
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001530New platforms
1531-------------
1532
1533None this time.
1534
1535Tests
1536-----
1537
1538- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1539 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1540
1541Windows
1542-------
1543
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001544- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1545
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001546- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1547 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1548 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1549 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1550 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1551 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1552 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1553 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1554 that's what it's for.
1555
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001556Mac
1557---
1558
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001559- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1560 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1561 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1562 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001563- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1564 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1565- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001566
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001567SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1568------------------------------------
1569
1570430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1571598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1572622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1573661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1574683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1575697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1576713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1577724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1578727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1579729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1580730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1581731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1582732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1583733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1584735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1585740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1586744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1587745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1588747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1589749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1590751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1591753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1592755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1593757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1594760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1595
1596
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001597What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1598================================
1599
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001600*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001601
1602Core and builtins
1603-----------------
1604
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001605- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1606 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1607
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001608- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1609 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1610 and cannot be strings).
1611
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001612- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1613 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1614 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1615 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1616
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001617- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1618 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1619 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1620 Python itself.
1621
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001622- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1623 the referenced object, if it has one.
1624
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001625- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1626 the thread started at
1627 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1628
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001629- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1630 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1631 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1632 placed on a list index.
1633
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001634- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1635 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1636 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1637 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1638
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001639- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1640 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1641 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1642 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1643 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1644 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1645 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1646
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001647- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1648 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1649 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1650 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1651 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1652
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001653- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1654 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001655
1656- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1657 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1658 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1659 #693195.)
1660
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001661- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1662 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001663
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001664- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001665 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001666 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1667 interpreter executions, would fail.
1668
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001669- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001670 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001671 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001672
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001673Extension modules
1674-----------------
1675
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001676- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1677 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1678 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1679 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1680
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001681- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1682 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1683
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001684- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1685 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1686 and Greg Chapman.)
1687
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001688- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1689 recursively.
1690
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001691- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001692 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1693 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1694 leaks.
1695
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001696- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1697
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001698- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1699 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1700 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1701 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1702 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1703 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1704 #705836.
1705
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001706- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001707 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1708
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001709- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1710 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1711 See SF bug #692416.
1712
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001713- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1714 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1715
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001716- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1717 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1718 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001719
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001720- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001721 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1722 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1723
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001724- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1725 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1726 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1727 timeouts to work properly.
1728
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001729Library
1730-------
1731
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001732- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1733 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1734 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1735 future release.
1736
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001737- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1738 for querying platform dependent features.
1739
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001740- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001741
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001742- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1743 pickle protocol versions.
1744
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001745- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1746 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1747 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1748
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001749- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1750
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001751- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1752 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1753 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1754 modules.
1755
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001756- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1757 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1758 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1759
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001760- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1761 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1762
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001763- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1764 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1765 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1766
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001767- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001768 MS Office extensions.
1769
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001770- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1771 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1772
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001773- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1774 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1775
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001776- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1777 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1778 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1779 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1780 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1781 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1782
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001783- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1784 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1785 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001786
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001787- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1788 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1789 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1790
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001791- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1792
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001793- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1794 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1795 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1796
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001797Tools/Demos
1798-----------
1799
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001800- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1801 See the module docstring for details.
1802
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001803Build
1804-----
1805
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001806- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1807 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001808
1809C API
1810-----
1811
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001812- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1813
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001814- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1815 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1816 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1817
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001818- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1819 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001820
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001821 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1822 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1823 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001824
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001825- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001826 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1827
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001828- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1829 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1830 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001831
1832New platforms
1833-------------
1834
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001835None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001836
1837Tests
1838-----
1839
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001840- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1841 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001842
1843Windows
1844-------
1845
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001846- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1847 function.
1848
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001849- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1850 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001851
1852Mac
1853---
1854
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001855- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1856 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001857
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001858- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1859 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001860
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001861- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1862 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1863 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001864
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001865- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001866 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1867 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001868
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001869- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1870 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001871
1872
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001873What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1874=================================
1875
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001876*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001877
1878Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001879-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001880
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001881- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1882 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1883 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1884
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001885- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1886 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1887 (SF patch #664376.)
1888
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001889- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1890 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1891 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1892 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1893 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1894 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001895 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001896
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001897- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1898 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1899 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1900 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001901 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001902
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001903- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1904 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1905 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1906 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1907 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1908 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1909 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1910 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1911 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1912 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1913 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1914
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001915- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1916 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1917 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1918 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1919 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1920 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1921
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001922- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1923 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1924
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001925- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1926 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1927 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1928 case.)
1929
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001930- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1931 passed as unicode strings.
1932
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001933- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1934 See SF bug #683467.
1935
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001936- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1937 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1938
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001939- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1940
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001941- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1942
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001943- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1944 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1945 arguments.
1946
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001947- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1948 See SF bug #667147.
1949
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001950- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001951 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001952 See SF bug #676155.
1953
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001954- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001955 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001956 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1957 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1958 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1959 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1960 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1961 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001962
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001963Extension modules
1964-----------------
1965
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001966- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1967 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1968 tp_as_number pointer.
1969
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001970- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1971 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1972 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1973 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1974 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1975
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001976- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1977
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001978- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1979
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001980- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001981 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001982 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1983 patch #678531.)
1984
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001985- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1986 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1987
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001988- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1989 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1990
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001991- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1992
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001993- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1994 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1995 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1996
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001997- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1998
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001999- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2000 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2001
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002002- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002003
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002004- datetime changes:
2005
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002006 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2007
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002008 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2009 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2010 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2011 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2012 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2013 now.
2014
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002015 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002016 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2017 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002018
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002019 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002020 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002021 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2022 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2023 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2024 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002025
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002026 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2027 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2028 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002029 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2030
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002031 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2032 by a later example coded by Guido.
2033
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002034 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002035 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2036 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2037 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002038 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2039 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2040
2041 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2042 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2043 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2044 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2045 tzinfo subclass instance.
2046
2047 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2048 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2049 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2050 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2051 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2052 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2053 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2054 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002055
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002056 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2057 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2058 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2059 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2060 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002061 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2062
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002063 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002064
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002065 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2066 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2067 as a naive datetime object.
2068
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002069 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2070 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2071 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2072
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002073 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2074 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2075 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2076 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2077 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2078 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2079 comparison.
2080
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002081 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2082 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2083 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2084 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002085 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002086
2087 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002088
2089 and ::
2090
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002091 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2092
2093 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2094 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2095 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2096 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2097
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002098 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2099 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2100 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2101 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2102 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2103
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002104 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2105 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002106 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2107 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002108
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002109Library
2110-------
2111
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002112- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2113 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2114
2115- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2116 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2117 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2118 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2119 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2120 See PEP 307 for details.
2121
2122- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2123 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2124
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002125- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2126 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002127 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002128 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2129 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002130 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002131
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002132- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2133 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2134
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002135- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2136 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2137 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2138
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002139- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2140
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002141- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2142 exception.
2143
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002144- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2145 class.
2146
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002147- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2148 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2149 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2150
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002151- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2152 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2153
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002154- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002155 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2156 See SF bug #659228.
2157
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002158- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2159 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2160 See SF patch #651082.
2161
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002162- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002163
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002164- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2165 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2166
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002167- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002168 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002169
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002170- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2171 DOS paths from other platforms.
2172
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002173Tools/Demos
2174-----------
2175
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002176- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2177 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2178 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2179 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2180 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2181 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2182 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2183 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2184 example:
2185
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002186 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2187 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002188
2189 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2190
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002191
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002192Build
2193-----
2194
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002195- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2196 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2197 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002198 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2199
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002200 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2201
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002202- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2203 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2204 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2205 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2206 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2207 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2208 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2209 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2210 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2211
2212- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2213 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2214 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2215 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2216
2217- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2218 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2219
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002220C API
2221-----
2222
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002223- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2224 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002225
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002226- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2227 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2228 tp_as_number pointer.
2229
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002230- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2231 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2232 (SF #681367)
2233
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002234- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2235 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2236 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2237 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002238
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002239Tests
2240-----
2241
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002242- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002243 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2244 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2245 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2246 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2247 pydoc.)
2248
2249- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2250
2251- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002252
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002253Windows
2254-------
2255
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002256- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2257 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2258 time).
2259
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002260- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2261 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2262
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002263- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2264 release without strong cryptography.
2265
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002266- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002267 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002268
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002269- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2270 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2271
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002272Mac
2273---
2274
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002275- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2276 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002277
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002278- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2279 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2280 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002281
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002282- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2283 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002284
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002285- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2286 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2287 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2288 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002289
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002290- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002291 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2292 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2293 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002294
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002295
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002296What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002297=================================
2298
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002299*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002300
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002301Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002302--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002303
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002304- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2305
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002306- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2307 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002308 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002309 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002310 a different meaning than before.
2311
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002312- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002313 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002314 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002315
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002316- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002317 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002318 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002319
2320- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2321 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2322 and deallocation.
2323
2324- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2325 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2326
2327- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2328 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2329 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2330 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2331 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2332
2333- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2334 now detected by the garbage collector.
2335
2336- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2337 [SF bug 519621]
2338
2339- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2340 identifier.
2341
2342- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2343 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2344 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2345 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2346 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2347 [SF bug 563060]
2348
2349- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2350 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2351 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2352 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2353 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2354
2355- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2356 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2357 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2358
2359- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2360
2361- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2362 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2363 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2364 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2365 state of the slots would be lost.)
2366
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002367Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002368-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002369
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002370- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002371 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2372 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2373 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2374 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002375 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2376 Jython 2.1.
2377
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002378- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002379 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002380 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2381 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2382 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2383 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2384 these, see PEP 302.
2385
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002386- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2387 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2388 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2389
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002390- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2391 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2392 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2393
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002394- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2395 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2396 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2397
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002398- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2399 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2400 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2401 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2402 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2403 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2404 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2405 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2406 releases or implementations.
2407
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002408- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002409 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2410 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002411
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002412- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2413 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2414
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002415- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2416 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2417 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2418
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002419- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2420 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2421
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002422- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2423 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002424 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2425 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002426
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002427- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2428 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2429 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2430 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2431 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2432
2433 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2434 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2435 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2436 pattern.
2437
2438 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2439 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2440 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2441 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2442
2443 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2444 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2445 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2446 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2447 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2448 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2449
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002450- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2451 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2452 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2453 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2454 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2455 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2456 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2457 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002458
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002459- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2460 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2461 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2462 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2463 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002464 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2465 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2466 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2467 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2468 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2469 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2470 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002471
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002472- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2473 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2474
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002475- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2476 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2477 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2478 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2479 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2480 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2481 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2482 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2483 to Zack Weinberg!
2484
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002485- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2486 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2487 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2488 type. This has been fixed now.
2489
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002490- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2491 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2492 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2493
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002494- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2495 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2496 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2497 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2498 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2499 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2500 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2501 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002502 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002503
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002504- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2505 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2506 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002507
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002508- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2509 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2510 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2511 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2512 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2513 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2514 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2515 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002516 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002517 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2518 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2519
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002520- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2521 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2522 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2523 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2524 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2525 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2526 this.)
2527
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002528- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2529 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002530 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002531 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002532 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2533 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002534 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2535 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002536
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002537- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2538 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2539 currently running.
2540
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002541- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2542 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2543 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2544 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2545
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002546- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2547 as directory names.
2548
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002549- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2550 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2551
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002552- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2553 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2554
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002555- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002556 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2557 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002558
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002559- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2560 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2561 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2562 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2563 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2564
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002565- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2566 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2567 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2568 removed.
2569
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002570- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2571 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2572 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2573
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002574- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2575 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2576 to __debug__.
2577
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002578- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2579 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2580 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2581
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002582- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2583 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2584 deprecated now.
2585
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002586- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2587 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2588 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002589
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002590- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2591 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2592 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2593 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2594 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002595
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002596- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2597 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2598
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002599- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2600 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2601 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002602 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002603 is backward compatible.
2604
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002605- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2606 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2607 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2608 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2609 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2610
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002611- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2612 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2613 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2614 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2615 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2616 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002617
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002618- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2619 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2620
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002621- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2622 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2623
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002624- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2625 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2626 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2627 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2628 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2629
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002630- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2631 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2632 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2633
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002634- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002635 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2636
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002637- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2638 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2639 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002640
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002641- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2642 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2643
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002644- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2645 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2646 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2647
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002648- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2649
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002650Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002651-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002652
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002653- Added three operators to the operator module:
2654 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2655 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2656 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2657
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002658- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2659
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002660- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2661 archives.
2662
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002663- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2664 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2665 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2666
2667 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2668
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002669- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2670 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2671 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002672 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002673
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002674- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2675 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2676 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2677 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002678 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2679 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2680 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2681 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002682
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002683- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2684 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002685
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002686- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2687
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002688- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2689 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2690
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002691- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2692 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2693 supported.
2694
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002695- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2696
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002697- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2698 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002699
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002700- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2701 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2702
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002703- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2704
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002705- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2706 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2707
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002708- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2709 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2710 functions but callable type objects.
2711
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002712- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002713 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002714 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002715
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002716- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2717 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002718
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002719- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2720 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002721
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002722- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2723 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2724 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2725 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2726
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002727- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2728 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002729
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002730- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2731 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2732 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2733 and __imul__.
2734
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002735- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002736 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2737 is called.
2738
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002739- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2740 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2741 interpreter was compiled.
2742
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002743- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2744 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2745 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002746 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002747 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2748 1, not 2.
2749
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002750- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2751 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2752 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2753 limit.
2754
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002755- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2756 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2757 bug #623464.
2758
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002759- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2760 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2761 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2762 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2763
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002764Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002765-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002766
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002767- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2768
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002769- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2770 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2771 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2772 with Python 2.3a2.
2773
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002774- os.path exposes getctime.
2775
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002776- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002777 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002778 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002779 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002780 unit tests of floating point results.
2781
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002782- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2783 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2784 has been increased.
2785
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002786- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2787 executed.
2788
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002789- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2790 postinstallation script.
2791
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002792- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2793 test the current module.
2794
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002795- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002796 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2797 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2798 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2799 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2800
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002801- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002802 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002803 Ward's Optik package.
2804
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002805- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2806 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2807 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2808 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2809
2810- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2811 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002812 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002813
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002814- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2815 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2816 shelf are binary pickles.
2817
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002818- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2819 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2820
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002821- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2822 modules are iterators now.
2823
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002824- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2825 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2826 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2827 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2828 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2829 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002830
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002831- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2832 with their entity value.
2833
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002834- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2835
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002836- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2837 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002838
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002839- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2840 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002841 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002842
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002843- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2844 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2845 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2846 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2847 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2848 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2849 main():
2850
2851 import locale
2852 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2853
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002854- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2855 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2856
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002857- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2858 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2859 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2860 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2861 to the new standard.
2862
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002863- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2864 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2865 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2866 an extension to the database.
2867
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002868- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2869 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2870 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2871 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002872 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002873
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002874- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002875 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002876
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002877- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2878 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2879 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2880 bounded integers.
2881
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002882- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2883 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2884 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2885 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2886 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2887 in existence.
2888
2889 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2890 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2891 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2892 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2893 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2894 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2895
2896 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2897 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2898 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2899 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2900
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002901- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2902 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2903 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2904
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002905- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2906
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002907- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2908 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2909 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2910 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2911
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002912- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2913 argument.
2914
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002915- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2916 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2917 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2918 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2919 [SF patch 560794].
2920
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002921- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2922 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2923 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002924 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2925 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2926 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002927
2928- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2929 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002930
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002931- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2932 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2933 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2934 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002935
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002936- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2937 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2938 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2939 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2940 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2941
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002942- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002943
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002944- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2945
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002946- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2947 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2948 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2949 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2950 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2951 identical to None.
2952
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002953- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2954 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2955 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2956 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2957 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2958 results now.
2959
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002960- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2961 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2962
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002963- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2964 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2965 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2966 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2967 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2968 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2969 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2970 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2971
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002972- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2973
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002974- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2975 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2976
2977- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2978 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2979 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2980 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2981 and other systems.
2982
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002983- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2984 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2985 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2986 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 +00002987 work well with these.
2988
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002989- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2990
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002991- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002992 connections.
2993
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002994- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2995 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2996 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2997
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002998- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2999 sets
3000
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003001- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3002 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3003 name.
3004
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003005- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3006 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3007 passed in.
3008
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003009- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003010 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003011 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3012 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003013
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003014- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3015
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003016- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3017
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003018- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3019 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3020 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3021
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003022- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3023 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3024 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3025 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003026 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003027
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003028- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003029 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003030 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003031
3032- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3033 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3034 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3035
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003036- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003037 the value of its expression argument.
3038
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003039- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3040 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3041 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3042
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003043- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3044 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3045 skipstone browser was included.
3046
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003047- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3048 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3049
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003050Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003051-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003052
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003053- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3054 names in addition to accepting file names.
3055
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003056- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3057 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3058 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3059 still used and useful.)
3060
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003061- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3062 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3063 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3064 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003065
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003066- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3067 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3068 the generated binary.
3069
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003070Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003072
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003073- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3074
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003075- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3076 except in the hands of experts.
3077
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003078- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003079 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3080 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3081 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003082
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003083- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3084 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3085 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3086 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3087 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3088 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3089 builds.
3090
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003091- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3092 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3093 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3094 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3095 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3096 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3097 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3098 new type.
3099
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003100- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003101
3102 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3103 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3104 positive infinities.
3105
3106 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3107 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3108 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3109 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3110 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3111 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3112 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3113
3114 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3115
3116 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3117
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003118- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3119 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3120 size of the executable.
3121
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003122- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3123 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3124 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3125 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003126
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003127- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3128
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003129- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3130 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3131 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003132
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003133- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3134 well as Unix.
3135
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003136- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3137 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3138 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3139 modules in the README file for details.
3140
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003141C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003143
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003144- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3145 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003146 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003147 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003148 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003149
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003150- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3151 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3152 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3153 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3154 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3155 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003156 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003157 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3158 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3159 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3160 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3161 aligned.)
3162
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003163- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3164 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3165 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3166
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003167- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3168 level.
3169
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003170- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3171 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3172 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3173 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3174 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3175
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003176- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3177 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3178 code.
3179
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003180- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3181 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3182 adjusting for negative indices.
3183
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003184- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3185 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3186 object.
3187
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003188- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3189 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3190 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3191
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003192- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3193 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003194
3195- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3196
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003197- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3198 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3199 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3200 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3201
3202- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3203
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003204- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003205
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003206- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003207 without going through the buffer API.
3208
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003210
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003211- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3212 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3213 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3214 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3215
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003216- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3217 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3218
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003219- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003220 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3221
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003222New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003224
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003225- OpenVMS is now supported.
3226
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003227- AtheOS is now supported.
3228
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003229- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3230
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003231- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3232
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003233Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234-----
3235
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003236- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3237 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3238 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003239
3240Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003241-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003242
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003243- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3244 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3245 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3246 bugs.
3247 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003248 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003249 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3250 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003251 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003252
3253- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003254 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003255
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003256- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3257 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3258
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003259- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3260 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003261 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003262 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3263
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003264- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3265 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3266 use files" uninstall option).
3267
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003268- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3269
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003270- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3271 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3272
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003273- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3274 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3275 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3276
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003277- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3278 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3279 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3280 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3281 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003282 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3283 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3284 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003285
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003286- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003287 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003288 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3289 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3290 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3291 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3292 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3293 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3294 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3295 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3296 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3297 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3298 work around.
3299
3300- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3301 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3302 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3303 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3304 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3305 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3306 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3307 specified with O_CREAT too).
3308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003309Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310----
3311
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003312- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003313
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003314- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3315 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3316 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3317
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003318- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3319 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3320 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3321
3322- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3323 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3324 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3325 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3326 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3327 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3328 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3329 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003330
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003331- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3332 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3333 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003334
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003335- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3336 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3337 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3338 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3339 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003340
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003341- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3342 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3343 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003344
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003345- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3346 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003347
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003348- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3349 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3350 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3351 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3352 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003353
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003354- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3355 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3356 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3357
3358- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3359 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3360 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003361
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003362- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3363 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3364 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3365 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003366 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003367
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003368- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3369 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003370
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003371- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3372 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003373
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003374- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003375 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003376 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3377 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003378
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003379
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003380What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003381===============================
3382
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3384
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003385Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003386--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003387
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003388- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3389 with a custom metaclass.
3390
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003391Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003393
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003394- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3395 are proxies.
3396
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003397Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003398-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003399
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003400- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3401 very short strings.
3402
3403- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3404 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3405 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3406 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3407 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3408
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003409Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003411
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003412- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3413 close or delete time).
3414
3415- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3416 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3417
3418- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3419
3420- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003421 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003422
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003423Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003424-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003425
3426Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003427-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003428
3429C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003431
3432New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003433-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003434
3435Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003436-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003437
3438Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003440
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003441- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3442
3443- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3444 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3445
3446- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3447 deleted at process exit time.
3448
3449- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3450 in backslash.
3451
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003452Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003454
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003455- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3456 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3457 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3458
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003459
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003460What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003461===========================
3462
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003463*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3464
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003465Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003466--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003467
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003468- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3469 been extensively updated. See
3470
3471 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3472
3473 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3474
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003475- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3476 deleted!
3477
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003478- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3479 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3480 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3481 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3482 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3483
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003484- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3485
3486 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3487 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3488
3489 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3490 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3491 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3492 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3493 supported anyway.
3494
3495 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3496 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3497
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003498- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3499 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3500 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3501 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3502 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003503
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003504- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3505 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3506 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3507
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003508Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003509-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003510
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003511- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3512 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3513 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3514 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3515 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3516 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003517 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3518 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3519 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3520 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003521
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003522- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3523 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3524 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3525
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003526Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003528
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003529- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3530
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003531Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003533
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003534- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3535 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3536 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3537 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3538 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3539 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3540
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003541- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3542
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003543- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3544
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003545- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3546
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003547- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3548 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3549 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3550
3551- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3552
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003553Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003554-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003555
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003556- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3557 off a search on Google.
3558
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003559Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003561
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003562- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3563 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3564 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3565 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3566 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3567 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3568 other platforms should do likewise.
3569
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003570- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3571 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3572 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3573
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003574C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003576
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003577- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3578 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3579 producing key-value pairs.
3580
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003581- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003582 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003583 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3584 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3585 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3586 previously went unchallenged.
3587
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003588New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003589-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003590
3591Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003593
3594Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003596
3597Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003599
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003600- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3601 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003602
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003603- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3604 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3605 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3606 home.
3607
3608
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003609What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003610===========================
3611
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003612*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3613
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003614Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003615--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003616
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003617- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3618 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003619
3620 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003621 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003622
3623 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3624 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003625 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003626 This needs to be documented.
3627
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003628- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3629 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3630
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003631- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3632 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3633 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3634
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003635- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3636 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3637
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003638- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3639 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3640 class forbids it).
3641
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003642- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3643 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3644 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3645
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003646- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3647
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003648Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003650
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003651- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3652 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003653 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003654
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003655- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3656 (like 1 + '').
3657
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003658Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003660
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003661- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3662 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3663 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3664 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003665 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003666 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3667
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003668- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3669 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3670 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3671 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3672
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003673- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3674 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003675 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3676 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3677 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003678
3679- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3680 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003681
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003682- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3683 bytes on its input.
3684
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003685Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003686-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003687
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003688- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003689 convenience function.
3690
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003691- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3692 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3693 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003694 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3695 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3696 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3697 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3698 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3699 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003700
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003701- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3702 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3703 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3704 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3705
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003706- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3707 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3708 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3709
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003710- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3711 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3712 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3713 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3714
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003715- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3716 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003718 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3719 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3720 new -l and -e options.
3721
3722- statcache is now deprecated.
3723
3724- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3725 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003727 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3728 time properly taken into account.
3729
3730- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3731 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3732 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3733 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3734
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003735Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003737
3738Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003740
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003741- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3742 is built with libdb3 if available.
3743
3744- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3745
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003746C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003748
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003749- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3750 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3751 PySequence_Size().
3752
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003753- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3754
3755- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3756 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3757 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3758
3759- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3760 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3761
3762- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3763 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3764
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003765New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003767
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003768- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3769 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3770
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003771- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3772 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3773
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003774- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3775
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003776Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003778
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003779- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3780 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3781
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003782Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003784
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003785Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003787
3788- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3789 removed completely in the next release.
3790
3791- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3792 OSX.
3793
3794- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3795 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3796
3797- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3798
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003799
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003800What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003801===========================
3802
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003803*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3804
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003805Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003807
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003808- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003809 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003810 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003811 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3812 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003813 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3814 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003815 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3816 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003817
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003818- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3819 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3820
3821- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3822 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3823
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003824Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003825-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003826
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003827- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3828 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3829 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3830 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3831 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3832 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3833 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3834 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3835
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003836- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3837 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3838 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3839 example).
3840
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003841- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003842 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003843 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003844 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003845
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003846- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3847 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3848 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003849 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003850
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003851- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3852 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3853 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3854 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3855 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3856 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3857
3858 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3859
3860 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3861
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003862Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003863-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003864
3865- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3866
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003867- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3868
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003869- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3870 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003871
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003872- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3873 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3874 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3875 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3876 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3877 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003878 attributes.
3879
3880- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3881 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3882 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003883
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003884- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3885 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3886 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003887
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003888- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3889 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3890 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003891 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3892 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3893
3894- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3895 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003896
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003897Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003899
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003900- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3901 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3902
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003903- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3904 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3905 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3906 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3907
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003908- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3909 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3910 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3911 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3912
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003913 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3914 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3915 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3916 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3917 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3918 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3919 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3920 without losing information).
3921
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003922- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003923 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3924 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3925 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3926 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3927 module).
3928
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003929 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003930 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3931 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3932 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3933 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003934
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003935- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003936 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3937 encoding.
3938
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003939- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3940 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3941
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003943 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3944
3945- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3946 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3947 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3948 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3949
3950- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3951
3952- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3953 ON, and OFF.
3954
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003955- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3956 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3957
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003958Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003960
3961- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3962 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3963 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003964
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003965- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3966 been added: -X and -E.
3967
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003968Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003970
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003971- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3972 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3973
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003974C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003976
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003977- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3978 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3979 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3980 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3981 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3982
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003983- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3984 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3985 as long) arguments.
3986
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003987- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3988 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3989 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3990 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3991 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3992 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3993
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003994- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3995 input.
3996
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003997New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003999
4000Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004002
4003Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004005
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004006- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4007 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4008 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4009
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004010- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4011 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4012 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004013 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004014
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4016 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4017 import signal
4018 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004019
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004021 while 1:
4022 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004024 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4025 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4026 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4027 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004028
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004029
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004030What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4031===========================
4032
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004033*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4034
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004035Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004037
4038- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4039 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4040 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4041
4042- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4043 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4044 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4045 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4046 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4047 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4048 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004049
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004050- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004051 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004052 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4053 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4054 associate a docstring with a property.
4055
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004056- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4057 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4058 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4059 other built-in object types.
4060
4061- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4062 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4063 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4064 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4065 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4066
4067- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4068 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4069
4070- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4071 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004072 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004073 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4074 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4075 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4076 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4077 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4078
4079- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4080 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4081 class.
4082
4083- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4084 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4085 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4086 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4087
4088- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4089 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4090 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4091 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4092
4093- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4094 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4095
4096- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4097 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4098 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4099 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4100 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004101 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004102 with the same value as s.
4103
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004104- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4105
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004106Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004108
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004109- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4110
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004111- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4112 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4113 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4114 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4115 objects.
4116
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004117- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4118 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004119 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4120 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4121
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004122- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4123 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4124 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4125
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004126Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004128
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004129- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4130 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4131 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4132 by the instances.
4133
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004134- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4135 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4136 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4137
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004138- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4139 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4140 before the entire comparison is complete.
4141
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004142- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4143 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4144 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4145
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004146- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4147 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4148 getwriter().
4149
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004150- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4151 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4152
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004153- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004154 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4155 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4156
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004157- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4158 iterable object.
4159
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004160- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4161 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004162
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004163- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4164 authentication.
4165
4166- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4167 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004168
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004169- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004170 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4171 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4172 a sample driver.)
4173
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004174Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004176
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004177- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4178 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4179 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4180 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4181 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4182 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4183 kernel has large file support.
4184
4185- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4186 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4187 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4188 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4189 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4190
4191- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4192 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4193 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4194
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004195C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004197
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004198- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4199 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4200
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004201New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004203
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004204- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4205 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4206
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004207Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004209
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004210- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4211 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4212 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4213 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4214 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4215
4216- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4217 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4218 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4219 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4220
4221- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4222 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4223
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004224Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004226
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004227- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004228 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4229 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004230
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004231
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004232What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4233===========================
4234
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4236
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004237Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004239
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004240- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4241 big to represent as a C double.
4242
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004243- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4244 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4245 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4246 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4247 restriction).
4248
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004249- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4250 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4251 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4252 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4253 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4254
4255 >>> dir([])
4256 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4257 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4258 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4259 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4260 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4261 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4262 'reverse', 'sort']
4263
4264 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4265
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004266- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004267 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4268 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4269 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4270 OverflowError exception.
4271
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004272- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004273 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004274 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4275 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4276 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4277 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4278 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004279 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4281 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4282
4283 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4284 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4285 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4286 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004287
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004288- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004289 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4290 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4291 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4292 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4293 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4294 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4295 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4296 once it is created.
4297
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004298- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4299 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4300 (key, value) pairs.
4301
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004302- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004303 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4304 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4305
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004306- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4307 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4308 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4309 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4310 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004311
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004312- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004313 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4314 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4315
4316 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4317
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004318- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004319 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4320
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004321Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004323
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004324- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004325 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4326 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004327
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004328- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4329 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4330 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4331 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4332 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4333 in this area anymore).
4334
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004335- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4336 threading.Timer.
4337
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004338- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4339 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4340
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004341- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004342 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4343
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004344- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004345 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4346 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4347 converted to Python longs.
4348
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004349- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004350 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4351
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004352- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4353 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4354 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4355
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004356Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004358
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004359- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4360 division operators as per PEP 238.
4361
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004362Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004364
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004365- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4366 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4367 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4368 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4369
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004370C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004372
4373- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004374
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004375- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4376 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004377 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4380 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004381 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004383
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004384- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004385 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4386 module:
4387
4388 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004389
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004390 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4391 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004392
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004393 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4394 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004395
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004396 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4397
4398 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4399
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004400- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004401 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4402 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4403 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004404
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004405New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004407
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004408- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4409 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4410 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4411 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4412 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004413
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004414Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004416
4417Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004419
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004420- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4421 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4422 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4423 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004424 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4425 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4426 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4427 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4428 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004429
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004430- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004431 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4432
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004433
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004434What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4435===========================
4436
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4438
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004439Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004441
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004442- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4443 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4444
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004445- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4446 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4447 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004448
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004449- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4450 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4451 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4452 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004453
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004454- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4455
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004457
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004458Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004460
4461- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004462 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004463 the module docstring for details.
4464
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004465Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004467
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004468- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004469 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4470 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4471 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004472
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004473- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4474 Nick Mathewson.
4475
4476Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004478
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004479- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4480 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4481 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4482 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4483 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4484 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4485 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4486 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4487
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004488- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4489 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4490 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4491 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4492
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004493- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4494 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4495 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4496 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4497 come a long way).
4498
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004499- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4500 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4501 write filters for these warnings).
4502
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004503- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4504 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4505 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4506 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4507 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4508
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004509- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4510 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4511 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4512 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4513 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4514 older distribution.
4515
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004516Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004518
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004519- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4520 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004521 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004522
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004523- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4524 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4525 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4526
4527- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4528
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004529- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4530
4531- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4532
4533- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4534
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004536
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004537- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4538
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004539New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004541
4542C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004544
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004545- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4546 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4547 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4548 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4549 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4550 against buffer overruns.
4551
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004552- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004553 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4554 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004555 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4556 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4557 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4558
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004559- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4560 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4561 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4562 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4563 deprecated.
4564
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004565Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004567
4568- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4569 relevant is found.
4570
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004571
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004572What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004573===========================
4574
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4576
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004577Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004579
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004580- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4581 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4582 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4583 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4584 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4585 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4586 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4587 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004588 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004589 repaired.
4590
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004591- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004592 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004593 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4594 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4595 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4596 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4597 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4598 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4599 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4600 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4601
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004602- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4603 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4604 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4605 leading BMO character).
4606
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004607- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4608 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4609 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4610
4611 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4612 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4613 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004614
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004615 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4616 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4617 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4618 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4619 for various simple to use conversions.
4620
4621 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4622 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4623
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4625 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4626 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4627 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4628 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4629 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4630 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4631 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4632 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4633 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4634 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4635 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4636 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4637 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4638 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004639
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004640- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4641 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4642 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004643 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004644 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004645
4646 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004647 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4648 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4649 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4650 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4651 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004652 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4653 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004654
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004655 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4656 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4657 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004658 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004659
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004660- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4661 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4662 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4663 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4664 floating arithmetic,
4665
4666 x = 9007199254740992.0
4667 print long(x)
4668
4669 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4670 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4671 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4672 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4673 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4674 functions are of good quality).
4675
4676 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4677 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4678 algorithms to break.
4679
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004680- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4681 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4682 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4683 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4684 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4685 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4686 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4687 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4688 order.
4689
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004690- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4691 operation along the most common code paths.
4692
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004693- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4694 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4695
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004696- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4697 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4698 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4699 {}.update(UserDict())
4700
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004701- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4702 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4703 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4704 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4705 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4706 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4707 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4708 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4709
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004710- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004711 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004713 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004714 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4715 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004716 join() method of strings
4717 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004718 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4719 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004721 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004722
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004723- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4724 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4725
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004726- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4727 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4728
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004729- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4730 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4731 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4732 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4733
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004734- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4735 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004736 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004737 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4738 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004739
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004740- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4741
4742
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004743Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004745
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004746- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004747 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004748 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4749 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4750
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004751- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4752 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4753
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004754- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4755 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4756 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4757 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4758
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004759- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4760 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4761 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4762
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004763- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4764
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004765- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4766
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004767- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4768 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4769 that are still imported into string.py).
4770
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004771- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4772
4773- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4774 Now it does.
4775
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004776- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4777
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004778- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4779 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4780 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4781 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4782 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004783 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4784 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004785
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004786- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4787 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4788 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4789 'help(object)'.
4790
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004791Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004793
4794- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004795 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004796 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4797 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4798
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004799- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004800 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4801 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004802
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004803C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004805
4806- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4807 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808
4809----
4810
4811**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**